19/01/2026
They arrived at Auschwitz like characters from a fairy tale stepping into a nightmare. Twelve members of the Ovitz family—seven of them dwarfs, the smallest just eighteen months old—descended from the cattle car on May 12, 1944, clutching their handmade costumes and miniature instruments. For years, they had been the Lilliput Troupe, beloved entertainers who sang in five languages and packed concert halls across Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. They were the only family in their village wealthy enough to own a car. They were observant Jews who always made it home for Shabbat. And now, in the spring of 1944, they were prisoners in hell.
On the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where SS guards routinely sent children, the elderly, and the disabled straight to the gas chambers, something extraordinary happened. Word of the dwarf family reached Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp physician known as the Angel of Death, whose obsession with genetic anomalies was matched only by his capacity for cruelty. When he learned of their arrival, witnesses recalled, he was "beside himself with joy."
The Ovitz family—Rozika, Franziska, Avram, Micki, Frieda, Elisabeth, Perla, and their average-sized relatives—became Mengele's prized possessions. He had them moved to special quarters, not out of mercy, but out of scientific greed. They were his living laboratory, and he intended to keep his specimens alive.
What followed was a grotesque inversion of their former lives. Once, they had performed on stages to thunderous applause. Now, they performed for Mengele's amusement, singing German songs to please their captor, knowing their survival depended on his whims. Once, they had been celebrated for their talent and beauty. Now, they were forced to strip naked before N**i dignitaries while Mengele lectured about genetics, presenting them not as human beings but as curiosities, specimens, proof of supposed racial degeneracy.
The experiments were relentless and excruciating. Mengele's team extracted bone marrow from their spines. They pulled out healthy teeth and tore out hair, searching for signs of hereditary disease. They poured scalding and freezing water into the dwarfs' ears to study their reactions. They injected chemicals into their eyes, causing temporary blindness and agonizing pain. Gynecologists subjected the married women to invasive examinations. Little Shimshon, the eighteen-month-old who had learned to speak in Auschwitz, endured the worst—daily blood extractions from the veins behind his ears and from his tiny fingers, often leaving him weak and pale. He called Mengele "tatti"—Yiddish for "daddy." Mengele corrected him: "Say uncle."
This was the same doctor who starved newborn babies to death while studying the effects. The same doctor who sent thousands to the gas chambers without hesitation. Yet he ensured the Ovitzes received better food, cleaner living conditions, and permission to keep their own clothes—not because he cared about them, but because he needed them healthy enough to withstand his experiments.
The family witnessed unspeakable horrors. They saw two newly arrived dwarfs killed and boiled so their bones could be displayed in a museum. They endured a terrifying incident when, through some confusion, they were actually locked in a gas chamber. The doors sealed. The vents opened. They began to choke. Then, suddenly, they heard Mengele's voice outside: "Where is my dwarf family?!" He ordered the doors opened immediately and the family revived. They had nearly been murdered by accident—saved not by humanity, but by their value as experimental subjects.
The taller family members were required to carry the dwarfs to and from the experimentation sites, forced witnesses to their loved ones' suffering. Eleven members of another family, the Slomowitz family, claimed to be relatives and were moved into the Ovitzes' quarters—a desperate gambit that saved their lives.
As Soviet forces approached in January 1945, most Auschwitz prisoners were forced on death marches westward. The Ovitzes, too weak and too valuable to Mengele, were among the few thousand left behind. On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz. All twelve family members had survived. They were the largest family to enter the death camp and emerge alive—a statistical impossibility, a dark miracle born not of mercy but of their captor's obsession.
The journey home was brutal. They walked for seven months, finally reaching their village of Rozavlea in northern Transylvania, only to find their home looted and their community destroyed. Most of their relatives had perished. But they had each other. They moved to Belgium briefly, then immigrated to Israel in 1949, settling in Haifa.
And then, impossibly, they performed again. The Lilliput Troupe reformed, playing the same songs, wearing the same handmade costumes, packing concert halls just as they had before the war. They bought a cinema hall in 1955 and retired from performing, but they had reclaimed something precious: their dignity, their art, their lives.
Rozika, the oldest, lived to age ninety-eight, dying in 1984. Perla, the youngest dwarf sibling—the one with "the loveliest face and the kindest personality"—survived until 2001, carrying the family's story with grace and resilience. Before her death, she testified about Mengele's atrocities and spoke to filmmakers and journalists, ensuring the world would know what they had endured.
The Ovitz family's survival was not a miracle of compassion. It was a testament to the cruelest irony of the Holocaust: that the very thing which made them targets—their dwarfism, their difference—became the key to their survival. They lived because a monster found them interesting. They endured because they were strong enough to withstand his cruelty. They survived because they had each other, because they never stopped singing, and because even in the darkest place humanity has ever created, they refused to let go of their humanity.
Their story is not about redemption. There is no redemption in Auschwitz. It is about endurance. About a family that entered hell together and walked out together. About performers who sang for their lives and lived to sing again.
