Prizant was born on 20 December 1929 in Majdan in the Carpathian Mountains which was then the most easterly part of Czechoslovakia. Before the Holocaust, a third of the population of Majdan were Jewish.
Little is known about Prizant’s family or childhood.
In 1938, Majdan and the surrounding area were annexed by Hungary with these territories formally incorporated into Hungary in 1939. The Nazi’s occupied Hungary in March 1944 and installed a puppet government. That government participated in the Holocaust.