The 2nd of February 1943, Stalingrad, the Soviet Union. The German 6th army, after 5 months of
fierce fighting and heavy casualties, having exhausted their ammunition and food, finally
capitulates, making it the first of Hitler's field armies to surrender during World War II.
The battle for the city proves a decisive psychological turning point,
ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward.
The Soviet army remains on the offensive and on the 27th of January 1945 enters Auschwitz,
the largest of the extermination centers. It is estimated that a minimum 1.3 million
people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and of these, at least 1.1
million were murdered. However, not all of its prisoners died. In this Nazi factory of horror,
the Soviet soldiers liberate more than 7,000 surviving inmates, who are mostly ill and dying.
Among them is the Ovitz family consisting of twelve members - ranging from an 18-month-old
baby to a 58 year-old woman. They are the largest family to enter Auschwitz
and to survive intact and consist mostly of dwarfs. This is the reason why they attracted
attention of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who subjected them to brutal medical experiments.
The Ovitz or Ovici family, coming from the northern Transylvania town of Rozavlea,
near Sighet, was the largest family of dwarves ever recorded. The head of the family,
Shimshon Eizik Ovici, was a dwarf, born in 1868. He worked as a Badchan - an
entertainer at weddings - and later became an itinerant rabbi in the region of Maramures.
He married an average-size woman, Blanca, who before dying at the age of 26,
gave birth to two dwarf children, Rozika born in 1886 and Franziska born 3 years later.
After the death of his first wife, Shimshon Eizik soon married Batia, also an average-size woman,
who, between 1903 and 1921 gave birth to eight more children, of whom five were dwarves: Avram,
Frieda, Micki, Elizabeth and Perla and three who were of average height: Arie, Sarah and Leah.
Shimshon died in 1923 and his son Avram replaced him in his career as a badchan. The Ovici's type
of dwarfism – pseudoachondroplasia - which is an inherited disorder of bone growth,
prevented them from doing any physical labour, and their height was only approximately
three feet, less than 92 centimeters. Their mother, Batia, exhorted her children
to cultivate a common skill, so they could earn their living together with no need to rely on
the kindness of strangers and to avoid ostracism or isolation. They therefore established their
own musical ensemble, named the Lilliput Troupe. Playing on child-sized instruments, they performed
a mix of music and comedy routines throughout Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. While the
seven dwarves performed, the average-size members of the family helped back-stage.
The Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
Hungary pursued a policy in tandem with Nazi Germany to undo the peace treaties
of post-World War I. It was a general belief among the nationalists, especially,
that Nazi Germany was bound to win the war. On the 20th of November 1940, Hungary became
the fourth member to join the Axis powers when it signed the Tripartite Pact - one of
a number of agreements between Germany, Japan, Italy, and other countries of the Axis Powers
governing their relationship. The same year when Hungary took over northern Transylvania
and implemented racial laws, the Ovitzes managed to obtain identification papers with no mention of
their religion and thereby continue their career. The following year, Hungarian forces participated
in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the invasion of the Soviet Union. Their participation was noted by
German observers for its particular cruelty, with occupied peoples subjected to arbitrary
violence. Hungarian volunteers were sometimes referred to as engaging in "murder tourism”.
Hungarian units suffered tremendous losses during the German defeat at Stalingrad on the eastern
front in 1942–1943 and after the defeat, Hungarian Admiral Miklos Horthy and Prime Minister Miklos
Kallay recognized that Germany would likely lose the war and they tried to negotiate a
separate armistice for Hungary with the western Allies. To prevent these efforts, German forces
invaded Hungary on the 19th of March 1944. Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers
of the Holocaust, arrived in Hungary the same day, and was soon joined by top members of
his staff and five or six hundred members of the SD, SS, and SiPo – Nazi Security Police.
Hitler's appointment of a Hungarian government more amenable to the Nazis meant that the
Hungarian Jews, who had remained essentially unharmed until that point, would now be deported
to Auschwitz concentration camp to serve as forced labour or be gassed. Eichmann toured northeastern
Hungary in the last week of April and visited Auschwitz in May 1944 to assess preparations.
Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, later testified that Heinrich Himmler, the head of
the SS responsible for the management of the concentration camps, had told him to receive all
operational instructions for the implementation of the Final Solution from Eichmann.
In mid-May the same year, the Hungarian authorities, in coordination with the
German Security Police, began to systematically deport the Hungarian Jews. Adolf Eichmann was
chief of the team of "deportation experts" that worked with the Hungarian authorities.
The Hungarian police carried out the roundups and forced the Jews onto the deportation trains.
In less than two months from the 15th of May to the 9th of July 1944, nearly 440,000
Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 145 trains. Most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau,
where, upon arrival and after selection on a rail ramp, about 80 percent of deportees
were gassed. Because the crematoria were unable to cope with the number of corpses,
firing pits were dug where bodies were burned.
Among the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz were also the Ovitzes who
were eventually captured in spring 1944 and twelve family members were deported
to Auschwitz on the 12th of May the same year. One average sized brother, Arie,
escaped the round up but was later arrested and executed the same year.
At Auschwitz, the process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized. When a
train stopped at the platform, the arrivals were lined up into two columns – men and boys in one,
women and girls in the other. The SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed a selection.
The only criterion was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death,
was determined at will. The SS personnel – when supervising the loading of prisoners who were
to be transported in cars to the gas chambers – often behaved inhumanly, and tortured the
incoming prisoners in a cruel way, beating the women, the men and the children with a stick
or with a cane while forcing them into the cars. The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware
of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp
where work was waiting for them, but first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe.
They were then told politely to hang their clothes on the hooks,
take a shower and were even promised they would be provided with soup and tea or coffee. However
they were taken into the gas chambers, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
After the victims were murdered, their gold teeth were extracted,
and women’s hair was shorn by the Sonderkommando which were groups of Jews forced to work in
the crematorium. The bodies were hauled to the crematorium furnaces for incineration,
the bones were pulverized and the ashes were scattered in the fields.
In the Auschwitz concentration camp queues, the Ovitzes were spotted by the previously mentioned
doctor Mengele, who was interested in anyone beyond the norm, be they twins, giants or dwarfs.
Though Mengele instructed that they be studied, instead, they were sent to the gas chambers.
One family member Perla Ovitz later recalled “The heavy metal door slammed behind us. Suddenly we
smelled gas. We tried to push up for air and one of us collapsed. It seemed to me like minutes but
it can only have been seconds. Then we heard a shout from outside the door: 'Where is my
dwarf family?' The door was opened and a soldier dragged us out and sloshed cold water over us."
Josef Mengele, known as the 'The Angel Of Death',
saved the Ovitzes as he collected curiosities for pseudoscientific
experiments on heredity conducted for his research in creating the Aryan master race.
He separated the Ovitzes from the rest of the camp inmates to add them to his collection of test
subjects. He was curious about the fact that the family included both dwarfs and taller members.
Mengele arranged to have special living quarters built for them, so they could be monitored.
To keep them healthy for his human experimentation, he arranged for them
to have more hygienic living conditions, better food and their own bedclothes. They also got to
keep their own fancy clothes, unlike the rest of the Auschwitz prisoners who wore striped uniforms.
The Ovitzes—like many other camp inmates—were subjected to various tests. Mengele's physicians
extracted bone marrow and pulled out teeth and hair to find signs of hereditary disease.
They poured hot and cold water in their ears and put different chemicals in their
eyes which made them temporarily blind. Mengele’s gynecological procedures toward
the four married dwarf women were so fierce that his assistant refused to
help him. The Nazi doctor simply felt sorry for the women and backed off.
Elizabeth Ovitz later remembered: “The most frightful experiments of all were the
gynecological experiments. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood,
dug into us, pierced us, and removed samples. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable
pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.”
Eighteen-month-old Shimshon Ovitz was put through the worst ordeals because
he had taller parents and was prematurely born; Mengele drew blood from the veins
behind his ears and from his fingers on a daily basis often causing weakness.
Adolf Hitler's favorite movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Knowing how dwarfs delighted
the Führer, Mengele decided to film a “home movie” of the Ovitz family for him ". Under
the threat of terror, the Ovitz family sang German songs for the amusement of the Führer.
At this time, the Ovitzes also witnessed two newcomer dwarfs
being killed and boiled so their bones could be exhibited in a Berlin museum.
Most members of the Ovitz family never truly expected to survive Auschwitz. They expected
to be killed after Mengele had finished his experiments, but they lived to see the liberation.
After the Soviet soldiers liberated the Auschwitz on the 27th of January 1945, the Red Army took the
Ovitzes to the Soviet Union where they lived in a refugee camp for some time before being released.
The Ovitzes then traveled on foot for seven months to their home village but after they
found their home looted and moved, they first moved to the town of Sighet and later to Belgium.
In May 1949 they immigrated to Israel, settled in Haifa, and began their tours again, being
quite successful and packing large concert halls. In 1955 they retired and bought a cinema hall.
The oldest, 98-year-old Rozika died in 1984. Franziska died at 91. The family member who
lived the longest, until 2001, was Perla Ovitz. When she was interviewed for the book “Giants:
The Dwarfs of Auschwitz”, she reflected, “If I was a healthy Jewish girl, 1 meter 70 tall,
I would have been gassed like hundreds of thousands of other Jews in my country.
So if I ever wondered why I was born a dwarf,
my answer would have to be that my handicap, my deformity, was God’s only way to keep me alive.”
The revenge of the Ovitz family was not only that they survived the Holocaust at
Auschwitz and Mengele’s inhuman experiments, but that they kept telling their life story
until their very end. In addition, their legacy and bravery will go on through their children.
Though the women did not become pregnant due to their small pelvises,
descendants of the dwarf men of the family were born and none of them had dwarfism.
Mengele never faced justice for his crimes. He lived as a free man in
Brazil where he died in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming.
In 1999, two years before her death, the last living member of the family, Perla Ovitz said:
“If the judges had asked me if Mengele should be hanged, I’d have told them
to let him go. I was saved by the grace of the devil; God will give Mengele his due.”
There were many tears shed for all of the members of the Ovitz Family.
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