The archives of the Auschwitz concentration camp, unsealed after the end of the Second World War, contain hundreds of photographs that bear witness to some of history’s darkest crimes. Among them is a particularly haunting image: a group of small-statured individuals seated around an elegantly set dinner table, surrounded by high-ranking officers in Nazi uniforms. They are dressed in their finest clothes. They are smiling. And yet every person in that room knew exactly what those smiles were worth — and what it cost to maintain them.
Who were these remarkable little people, and how did they come to share a table with the very men who controlled their fate? Their story begins not in a camp, but in a small Carpathian village — and it is a story not of victims, but of survivors.
A Musical Family in the Mountains of Transylvania
In the late nineteenth century, a man named Rabbi Shimshon Eizik Ovitz lived in Rozavlea, a quiet village nestled in the Transylvanian region of Romania. Shimshon was a person of short stature — a dwarf by birth — but his personality filled every room he entered. He made his living as a badchan, a traditional Jewish wedding entertainer known for wit, song, and the ability to lift spirits through humor and melody. He was beloved in his community, known for his infectious energy and his extraordinary talent for music. He could play nearly every instrument he touched.
Shimshon married twice, both times to women of average height. Between his two marriages, he fathered ten children. Seven of those children inherited his condition and were also born with dwarfism. As they grew, Shimshon recognized something unusual: his family, in its very uniqueness, held a rare kind of potential. He began teaching the children to sing, to joke, to perform, and to play instruments. Music was in their blood. The lessons came naturally.
But Shimshon did not live to see the full flowering of his creation. He passed away in 1923. His second wife, Batia, took over the children’s training with quiet determination. She commissioned miniature violins, guitars, and cellos — instruments small enough for small hands — and made sure every child was proficient. Before she too passed away, she extracted a solemn promise from her children: they would always protect one another. No matter what came, they would never abandon each other.
The Lilliput Troupe Takes the Stage
After their mother’s death, the Ovitz siblings did what their parents had raised them to do: they performed. They formed a traveling entertainment group and called it the Lilliput Troupe. Their shows were vibrant, multilingual spectacles — Romanian songs, Hungarian folk tunes, German melodies — and they drew audiences from all walks of life.
By the 1930s, Europe was growing increasingly dangerous for Jewish families. Anti-Semitic sentiment was rising sharply across the continent, fueled by Nazi ideology spreading outward from Germany. Yet the Ovitz family found a way to navigate these treacherous waters. Their talent was their armor. Their charm was their passport. Powerful admirers — including high-ranking officials who attended their performances — helped them obtain falsified documents. On paper, the Ovitz family became an ordinary Hungarian family with no Jewish identity.
The troupe was organized like a small company. Older siblings Arie, Sarah, and Leah handled logistics: booking venues, ordering costumes, arranging transportation and set design. The younger performers — Rozika, Franziska, Avram, Freida, Micki, Elisabeth, and Perla — took the stage. As some siblings married, their spouses joined the family enterprise. The group even purchased an automobile for touring — a significant luxury in that era.
For a time, the Lilliput Troupe flourished.
The Road That Led to Auschwitz
In 1940, the northern part of Transylvania was transferred to Hungary under the Second Vienna Award. The Hungarian government had already aligned itself with Hitler’s regime, but for a few more years, the Ovitz family continued touring relatively undisturbed, protected by their false documents and widespread goodwill.
Then came 1944.
Germany occupied Hungary in March of that year, and the Nazi security apparatus moved swiftly and efficiently. The Gestapo had little difficulty uncovering the truth about the Ovitz family’s Jewish origins. Preparations began to deport them, along with thousands of other Hungarian Jews, to a concentration camp.
At the railway station, one SS officer showed a particular fascination with the troupe of small performers, and so the family was kept in Hungary for one additional month, entertaining Nazi officials. But it was only a delay. In early May 1944, they were loaded into a transport train and sent east — directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They knew. The entire family, every member of the troupe, understood where the train was headed. And yet, rather than collapse into despair, they did the only thing they had ever known how to do: they performed. They sang. They played instruments in the rattling freight car. They even handed out mock “invitations” to a future concert inside the camp. For many of the other passengers, it was the last music they would ever hear. But they smiled. They even laughed. Because of seven small people who refused to let hope die.
Arrival at the Death Factory
Auschwitz-Birkenau operated with cold, mechanical precision. Trains arrived. Prisoners disembarked. A selection process immediately sorted the living from the condemned: those fit for labor went to barracks; those deemed unfit — the elderly, the ill, children, and the physically disabled — were sent directly to the gas chambers.
The Ovitz family, given their small stature, would almost certainly have been directed toward the chambers. But on this particular day, an SS guard noticed the unusual group and set them aside. He placed a telephone call to the camp’s chief medical officer — a man whose name would become synonymous with atrocity: Dr. Josef Mengele.
Mengele, who had a personal obsession with what he called “biological anomalies,” was immediately interested. He ordered the Ovitz family transferred to a special block and given their own barracks. For the moment, they were spared.
For a week, nothing happened. The family was fed, housed, and left alone. The uncertainty was unbearable. Why had they been separated? What was being planned for them? The performers who had always known how to read an audience now found themselves unable to read the room.
In the Hands of Dr. Mengele
What followed was a prolonged nightmare disguised, at first, as medical curiosity. Dr. Mengele began with seemingly routine procedures: blood draws, genealogical questionnaires, medical histories. Another family of short-statured prisoners — the Slomowitz family — was also brought into the studies. The Ovitz siblings presented them as distant relatives, and from that point on, the two families stayed together and protected each other.
But Mengele’s procedures grew darker.
Bone marrow was extracted from the Ovitz family members. They were subjected to prolonged X-ray radiation. Women in the family had caustic solutions injected into their bodies. The family members were alternately exposed to scalding and freezing water. They were infected with pathogens as part of cruel endurance studies.
Not a single day passed without at least one family member being carried unconscious from the medical block on a stretcher.
And yet — they endured it all. They were paraded in front of medical staff without clothing, their bodies measured and examined and mocked. They were referred to by dehumanizing labels. Through all of it, the Ovitz family stood with their heads held high. They smiled when called “comic dwarves.” They knew, with painful clarity, that compliance and composure were their only shields. Anger meant death. Dignity was survival.
January 1945: Liberation at the Final Hour
As the winter of 1944 turned into 1945, Soviet forces advanced rapidly toward Poland. The Nazi command, sensing inevitable defeat, began destroying evidence of its crimes. The gas chambers operated at maximum capacity. Black smoke from the crematoria blanketed the camp day and night.
The Ovitz family waited in their barracks. They sang together, softly, in the darkness — not knowing if it would be the last time. They held one another and prepared for the worst.
Then, unexpectedly, they heard voices outside — Russian voices.
The Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. The Ovitz family — all twelve members, plus the spouses and relatives who had been with them — walked out of the camp alive. In a place where survival was measured in days, they had survived for months. It was, by any measure, a miracle.
Life After the Unimaginable
In the weeks following liberation, the Ovitz family made their way back to Rozavlea, the Transylvanian village where their story had begun. But Europe held too many ghosts. After a brief return to performing, they settled briefly in Antwerp before emigrating to Israel in 1949 as part of the wave of survivors seeking a new beginning in the newly founded Jewish state.
For years, they continued touring across Israel, bringing music to audiences who had themselves survived the war. In 1955, they opened a cinema and a café in Haifa. The stage performances stopped. The instruments were put away. But the family remained together — as they had promised their mother they always would.
Josef Mengele, the man responsible for their suffering, was never brought to justice. He fled to South America after the war, living under assumed identities in Argentina, Paraguay, and finally Brazil. He died of a stroke while swimming in 1979, at the age of 67, having evaded capture for over three decades.
Giants in Every Sense
The Ovitz siblings began passing away one by one starting in 1972. The last surviving member, Perla Ovitz, died in 2001. In one of her final interviews, she reflected on their extraordinary fate with quiet wisdom: “If we had been of normal size, we would have been burned immediately. We were saved by our ‘ugliness.'”
In 2004, Israeli journalists Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev published In Our Hearts We Were Giants, a full account of the Ovitz family’s story. The book was translated into dozens of languages and became an international bestseller — ensuring that the world would never forget the seven small performers from Rozavlea who faced the worst of humanity and refused to be broken.
They were small in stature. They were immeasurable in spirit.