Judith Szentivanyi Biography

Judith Szentivanyi was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1928. Conditions for Jews in her city remained stable from 1939 until March 1944, when the Germans invaded. That summer, Judith and her mother and sister were taken to a local brick factory, where they were detained for several days before being taken on a train to Auschwitz. At that point her mother and sister were taken away to the gas chambers, while she was taken to the Plaszow work camp. In January of 1945, Plaszow was closed and the prisoners returned to Auschwitz. This time Judith was there for several months before being taken to Parschnitz, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, where she worked in the AEG factory. After being liberated by the Russians, she returned to Hungary, where she was reunited with her father and her aunt. She and her husband, Andor Szentivanyi, were married in 1948. They left Hungary in 1956 and came to the United States, where both worked in the medical field. In 1969 they came to Tampa, where her husband had been offered a position with the USF College of Medicine; he eventually became the college's dean. Szentivanyi retired in 1996 and frequently speaks about her experiences in the Holocaust.