The photograph shows a family seated around a festive table, surrounded by Nazi officers. The little people are well dressed, smiling. It is one of the most haunting images to emerge from the archives of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a picture that seems to capture a moment of bizarre celebration inside a death factory.
But behind that frozen smile lies one of the most extraordinary and brutal stories of the Holocaust — the story of the Ovitz family, a troupe of Jewish dwarfs from Transylvania who survived Auschwitz because the camp’s infamous doctor, Josef Mengele, wanted to study them.
The family’s story begins in the late nineteenth century, in a small Carpathian village called Rozavlea, in Transylvania. There lived Rabbi Shimshon Ovitz, a man of short stature but enormous spirit. Known across the region as a cheerful toastmaster at weddings, Shimshon played practically every musical instrument and won the hearts of more than one or two girls with his songs.
He married twice, both times to women of normal height, and fathered ten children. Seven of them were born midgets.
As the children grew, the enterprising father realized that such an unusual family could earn good money. He created a family troupe of itinerant artists, teaching the children songs, jokes and the playing of different musical instruments — all the tricks of street performers. The children learned fast.
But Shimshon did not live long enough to enjoy his creation. He died in 1923.
His second wife, Basia, took over the training of the future artists. She ordered miniature violins, guitars and cellos for the little hands of the children and strictly made sure they learned to play them. Basia died too, and before she died she made the children vow that they would always take care of each other.
After burying their mother, the Ovitz siblings decided to go out into Europe to make a living. They called their band the Lilliput Troupe.
It was the 1930s. Most European states supported Nazi policies, and attitudes toward Jews were far from favorable. But the talented family won the hearts of audiences wherever they went.
Their popular songs were heard in every language from Romanian to German. Among the great admirers of the troupe were high-ranking officials who helped the little artists change their documents. The Ovitzes became, on paper, an ordinary Hungarian family.
Duties in the troupe were clearly divided. The taller members — Arye, Sarah and Leah — organized concerts, ordered costumes and set up decorations. The smaller members — Francesca, Rozika, Freida, Mickey, Elizabeth, Abraham and Perla — performed on stage.
The band grew as members married and new family members joined the friendly team. The family even bought a car to go on tours. All this time, the Lilliput Troupe was doing great.
In 1940, part of Transylvania passed to Hungary. The Hungarian government already supported Hitler’s policy toward the Jews, but this had no effect on the Ovitz family. They continued to tour as before, with false documents.
Then came 1944, the tragic year. The Nazis occupied Hungary, and the Gestapo had no trouble discovering the real origins of the Ovitz family. In March, the troupe, along with the rest of the Jews, began to be prepared for deportation to the concentration camps.
One of the SS officers at the railway station had a particular liking for the group, and so the Ovitz family entertained the Nazis in Hungary for another month. In early May, however, they were loaded into wagons and sent straight to the Auschwitz death camp. All the way there, the little artists, well aware of where they were being taken, tried not to lose their courage and did not let the others lose theirs either.
They sang songs, played instruments and even handed out invitations to their concert in the camp. For many, it was their last performance. But people smiled and even laughed when they saw the funny little people.
Auschwitz welcomed the new so-called batch of living material as usual, with a finely tuned conveyor belt: unloading, lineup, inspection. The healthy to the right, the sick and injured to the left. The healthy to the barracks, the rest to the gas chamber.
During the inspection, an SS man noticed a group of amusing little midgets. He took them aside, then telephoned Dr. Mengele and reported that the new batch of arrivals contained material that would be of interest to him.
Mengele ordered the midgets to be housed in a separate barrack. The Ovitzes even cheered up. What awaited them, as people incapable of hard labor, was the gas chamber — and here was a separate barrack and an exemption from work.
For a week, the family lived in obscurity. They were not taken anywhere, they were not asked any questions, and they were well fed. But what did it all mean, the artists wondered.
Why were they separated from the others? What was ahead of them?
A week later, the Ovitzes were moved to a separate block. As it turned out later, this was where Dr. Mengele kept those whom he wanted to study in detail, those who in his opinion were of interest for his horrific research.
The first experiments on midgets were, at first glance, harmless. They took blood samples, asked about their ancestry, found out what diseases they had suffered. The Shlomowitz family of midgets also participated in the experiments alongside the Ovitzes.
The little artists introduced them to Mengele as their distant relatives. The two families began to stick to each other.
Gradually, Mengele moved on to more serious experiments. Not a single day went by that a family member was not brought out of the laboratory on a stretcher, unconscious. Mengele took brain samples from the midgets.
He irradiated them. He injected a scalding solution into their uteruses. He poured boiling water over them.
He infected them with viruses and watched to see how the little people would endure all this, and whether they would survive.
But the little people survived. They endured the pains of hell and did not lower their heads. When they were displayed naked as exhibits and their genitals were viewed, the Ovitzes always stood with their heads held high and even smiled when they were called cartoon dwarfs.
They knew perfectly well that only patience could prolong their lives for a few more days. And so they were patient.
In January 1945, the Nazis, realizing their ultimate defeat, were freeing themselves from the evidence. Every day, large numbers of people were driven into the gas chambers. The crematorium chimney, which smoked every day with black smoke, now covered the entire camp with it.
The Ovitz family also waited their turn. They sat in the barracks and all sang sad songs together, perhaps for the last time. Suddenly, Russian speech was heard outside the windows, and the little people cried.
Could it be that the rumors that the Russians were beating the Nazis were true?
The entire Ovitz family survived, except for one of the brothers who tried to escape from the camp because he could not continue to witness all those tortures and experiments. He was killed by a guard post.
After the liberation, the Ovitz family went to Antwerp. A few years later, they all moved together to Israel, where they toured the country with concerts for a long time. In 1955, the family opened their own business.
They never gave any more concerts.
But what happened to Josef Mengele after the war? Dr. Josef Mengele, despite his enormous crimes, managed to escape punishment.
He watched the Ovitz family for the rest of his life from Brazil, making notes in his diary. It is hard to believe, but this man lived happily into old age without having to answer for his atrocities, and may have lived even longer if he had not had a heart attack.
The years spent in the Nazi concentration camp had taken their toll. From 1970 on, one by one, the Ovitz family members began to pass away. The last to die was Perla, in 2001.
In one of her interviews, she said that if they had been ordinary people instead of Lilliputians, they would hardly have survived the death factory. What other people consider ugly helped them to survive. They remained giants at heart.
After their deaths, a book was published called “We Were Giants at Heart” about the fate of the Ovitz family. It was written by their compatriots, Loti Negev and Yehuda Koren. The book was translated into dozens of languages and became an international bestseller.
Thus the whole world learned the extraordinary story of the Lilliput family who miraculously survived within the walls of Auschwitz — a family that walked into the gas chamber’s shadow and walked out again, heads held high, because a Nazi doctor found them interesting enough to keep alive.