Biography
Judit Schichtanz is the daughter of Lorand and Ella (Lichtig) Schichtanz. She was born April 14, 1935 in Budapest, where her father worked as an architectural draftsman and her mother, as a piano teacher. The Jewish family was quite assimilated and always had a Christmas tree at home. After one of Ella's students became a boarder in a convent school, Ella began teaching there on a regular basis. Ella confided to the Mother Superior that she was Jewish in 1941. On her recommendation, both she and Judit converted to Catholicism that year. Judit took her First Communion in 1943. Realizing the precariousness of their situation as newly converted Jews, Ella took Judit to a studio to pose for formal photographs dressed in her communion gown. The Schichtanz family continued to live at home after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, but two months later, on May 17, Lorand was drafted into the Hungarian labor service at the age of 44. The following month, on June 24, Ella and Judit had to move in with their grandparents into one of the designated Yellow Star buildings in Budapest. In early October Ella was ordered to report for forced labor. On her way to register, she slipped out of line. Though she was wearing the yellow star, she attached herself to a Romani woman who was walking with her two children and feigned that one was hers. Ella was then stopped by an SS officer who asked her where she was going, and she replied, "I have a child under ten years old, can't you see," asserting that this exempted her from forced labor. The officer was so taken aback that he let her go. She then returned to her apartment and gave the Romani mother some baby clothes in exchange for her assistance. Soon afterwards, Ella was able to obtain false papers with the help of her sister-in-law. She then got back in touch with the Mother Superior of the convent, who helped her find a job as a maid with a Hungarian family. Judit worked for the same family as a babysitter. This arrangement worked for a month until the family fled the capital out of fear of the advancing Russian army. Ella and Judit then turned once again to the Mother Superior for help in finding them a new position. She quickly found them another family. Their second employer, however, suspected them of being Jews because his own parents knew the people whose documents they were using. Fortunately, after Ella showed him Judit's communion photographs, he stopped challenging them. After living with this family for little more than a week, they all had to move into a bunker until the liberation of Budapest. Judit remained in Hungary until 1956, when she escaped by foot to Vienna after the Huhgarian revolution. There she continued her musical studies at the Academie fur Music. She immigrated to the United States in late 1960. Her father, Lorand, also survived the war. On November 28, 1944 he had been taken to Austria by freight car to do forced labor for the TODT organization on the Eastern Wall in Schuetzen am Gebirge. At the end of March or the beginning of April, he was marched on foot to Mauthausen and then to Gunskirchen, where he was finally liberated on May 4, 1945. Upon his release, Lorand decided not to return to Hungary and his family. He began a new life, probably under a new identity.
