How dwarfism helped a family of Jewish musicians Ovitz survive the experiments at Auschwitz
The story of an artistic family of Jewish midget musicians from Romania, who managed to survive Auschwitz and the monstrous experiments of Dr. Mengele.
Among the many prisoners of Auschwitz who met Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945, was the Jewish Ovitz family. Seven brothers and sisters originally from the Romanian town of Roosevelt lived in a labor camp for almost a year. However, the main thing is not this, but the fact that the family consisted of midgets and people of normal height, and during the imprisonment of Ovits, Dr. Mengele examined.
The Ovitz family was originally from Romania. His father, named Shimshon, was a dwarf, which, however, did not prevent him from being married to tall women twice. From them he had ten children, seven of whom were midgets, and three more were not.
Shimshon died in 1923, when the youngest daughter, Perla, was not yet two years old. His second wife, Batya, was left to raise the children alone. She was well aware that dwarf children would have a hard time in life, and therefore decided to teach them music from an early age so that they could later earn a living.
The Ovitz children turned out to be very talented, and soon they had already organized a family ensemble, there were guitar and violin, drums and cello and other instruments. Family concerts were attended not only by dwarf children, but also by the entire large family.
Dying, Batya bequeathed the children to always stick to each other and in no case not to part. And all the Sheep were always together. Only one of the brothers died, who, by the way, left the others.
Lilliputian collectives enjoyed success in pre-war Europe. In the early 1930s, the Sheep began to perform as a musical group, calling it the "Troupe of Lilliputians". Using smaller instruments, they played in the 30-40s in Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and became pop stars.
The sheep sang in Yiddish, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian and German. Between tours, they lived with their spouses all in the same house, fulfilling the mother's order not to be separated: every time someone got married or got married, the spouse began to live with them, helping the troupe. Doctors forbade married midgets to give birth, but one of the midgets had a daughter without abnormalities: the genetic disease of Shimshon was not transmitted to her. The family had their own car, the first in the area.
When Northern Transylvania was ceded to Hungary (an ally of Nazi Germany) in September 1940, new racial laws came into effect on its territory: Jews were forbidden to speak to non-Jews. However, the Ovits managed to obtain documents that did not mention their Jewish origin, and thus they continued to give concerts until 1944. At the same time, they continued to observe the Sabbath, if necessary, pretending to be sick, so as not to hold concerts on that day.
In 1944, Hungary was occupied by German troops; at the same time, the Sheep could no longer hide their origin, and they were forced to wear yellow stars. On April 15, the Germans gathered them, among other Jewish residents, in a synagogue for further transportation to the camp. A German officer saw them there, moved them into an apartment and forced them to entertain their colleagues in the following evenings. This lasted until May 15, when all twelve family members were sent to Auschwitz.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz (Auschwitz) Ovitz already on the platform attracted the attention of camp workers when Miki Ovitz began to distribute promotional postcards of the troupe. In total, 12 family members came to the camp — from a 15-month-old child to a 58-year-old woman. They were reported to Dr. Mengele, who settled the Ovits separately from the rest of the prisoners and released them from work. Mengele, in particular, became interested in the fact that there are both dwarfs and people with normal growth in the family. Later, the Shlomovitz family (parents and six children) joined their family and called themselves their relatives (and the Sheep themselves did not give them away).
Mengele, who set up a "human vivarium" in Auschwitz, had no remorse for torturing, bullying and killing a huge number of people. No wonder he got his nickname — Doctor Death. His enthusiasm, ambition and cruelty distinguished him even from other doctors who worked in death camps. One of the first tasks in his career was to cope with the typhus epidemic in the women's barracks. He solved this problem by sending all 498 women to the gas chamber. He also commissioned the murder of a family of gypsies to examine their eyeballs. However, Mengele had other plans for the Ovitz family.
The day after arriving at Auschwitz, the little people ended up in the doctor's laboratory. It looked like a very ordinary clinic — doctors in white coats, nothing extraordinary. It seemed to them that all the staff wanted was to take a blood test from the Sheep. A small price to pay for keeping them alive. However, bloodletting was repeated every week along with X-ray irradiation.
To observe the dwarfs, Mengele arranged a special quarter in the camp, created somewhat better sanitary conditions and food for them than for the rest of the prisoners (after he saw that they were weakening from the usual camp food), and also allowed them to stay in their clothes and not shave their hair. He forced the taller family members to wear dwarfs for experiments.
Ovitsy, like many other prisoners of the camp, were subjected to various experiments. Mengele's staff took a large amount of blood from them for tests, extracted bone marrow, pulled out teeth and hair in search of signs of hereditary diseases, exposed them to radioactive radiation, injected bacteria, poured hot and cold water into their ears and instilled drops in their eyes that blinded them for half a day. Gynecologists examined married women and injected a scalding liquid of unknown chemical composition into their uterus.
The 18-month-old Shimshon Ovitz was subjected to the worst tests, because he had parents of normal height, and he himself was born prematurely; Mengele took blood from his veins behind his ears and from his fingers. The sheep also saw two newly arrived dwarfs killed and boiled to display their bones in a museum.
Mengele probably didn't know what he was looking for. There was no mention in his papers that he wanted to detect the dwarfism gene —only routine tests and the results of kidney and liver examinations. Psychiatrists bombarded the midgets with questions to find out their level of intelligence. Doctors have repeatedly tested them for syphilis. Dora Ovitz, the wife of the eldest of the brothers, Avram, was interrogated by Mengele about her sexual life with her husband.
Judging by the memories of the Ovits themselves, Mengele became attached to them. According to the stories of one of the sisters, Mengele called them by the names of the seven dwarfs from the Disney cartoon. Ironically, one of the prisoners of Auschwitz, the artist Dina Gottlieb, who made documentary sketches of seven midgets, married the leading animator of "Snow White" Art Babbitt after the war.
When Mengele was transferred from Auschwitz, the mass extermination of people began, and the Sheep almost accepted that they were all destined to die, but everything turned out differently. In January 1945, the concentration camp was liberated, and, what was absolutely amazing, the Ovitz family survived to this day in full. It became a kind of record — 12 members of the same family, the youngest of whom was 15 months old, and the oldest — 58 years old, survived Auschwitz. They were held for some time in a Soviet refugee camp, and then released.
For 7 months, the Sheep traveled on foot to their native village. Finding your home in After being looted, they first moved to the village of Sighet, then they managed to get a Belgian visa, and they settled in Antwerp. It was not possible to tour in post-war Europe, and in May 1949 they moved to Israel, settled in Haifa and began concert activities again, enjoying success and gathering large halls. At the same time, they changed the program: instead of songs in foreign languages, one-act plays from the life of the town were played. In 1955, they left the stage and purchased two cinemas and a cafe.
The descendants of male midgets were born of normal height. One of the brothers was the first to die in 1972. The eldest of the sisters, Rozika, died in 1984 at the age of 98, the youngest, Perla, in 2001 at the age of 80. They are also buried all together in the same family plot of the cemetery.
The whole world learned about the history of the Lilliput Ovitz family troupe thanks to the publication of memories of Auschwitz by Pearl Ovitz. The woman told about the experience only after the death of all the other family members. Shortly before her death, Pearl once said in an interview: