"The 7 dwarfs of Auschwitz" and Mengele's experiments
On May 19, 1944, Perla Ovitz and her family walked through the gates of Auschwitz, under the stunned gaze of SS guards. Standing no taller than a five-year-old child, the two well-dressed men and the five ladies in their plumed dresses and theatrical make-up did not seem to understand that they had "landed" in one of the hell-camps set up by the Nazi death machine. of the Third Reich throughout Europe, in contrast to the remaining "links" of the enormous human chain that were led directly from the death wagons to the gas chambers...
The Ovics came from the small village of Rosavela in northern Romania. Their father Isaac married twice and fathered seven dwarf children and three of normal height. The "Lilliputian" members of the family had a talent for music and following their mother's admonition "...for better or for worse, never be apart. Be united, guard each other, live for each other...” they formed their own troupe - Lilliput Troupe - in the 30s. For many years they performed in Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, gaining great fame, until their journey was violently interrupted when they were taken to Auschwitz.
It was, however, this physical deformity of the seven - out of a total of twelve - members of the Ovitz family that saved them from the gas chambers, but not from the horrible experiments of the infamous Dr. Mengele, who upon learning of their arrival at the camp is said to have jumped out of his chair and run to see his news... guinea pigs.
"If I had been a healthy Jewish boy, six feet 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 be that my disability, my deformity, was God's only way of keeping me alive," Perla Ovitz told Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, the Israeli writers and journalists at the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, who wanted to record her family's history. Her testimony is just one of the aspects of the shocking story told in the book "The 7 Dwarfs of Auschwitz" (published by Pigi), which was presented in Athens and Thessaloniki.
Despite all the pain and trauma - mental and physical - that the experiments that "Dr. Death", Perla Ovitch will say, almost half a century later, to Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, that ...she was saved thanks to the devil!
Such was her faith, in fact, that she owes the fact that all the members of her family survived to being part of Mengele's experiment group, which, as Yehuda Koren tells the Athens News Agency, once he went to speak to children about the Holocaust and the importance of historical memory, along with her wallet and lipstick he put a photo of himself in her purse. "To show them my boss" she explained to Koren, who was looking at her quizzically. While when Mengele died, he "cried all night," adds Eilat Negev.
"She believed that God was the only one who should punish him for all his heinous crimes, while she herself was searching for Mengele's son until the end of her life, in order to find any evidence of the experiments, to which she was so subjected same as the other members of her family" explains Negev and remembers the now elderly - they met her in 1994 - Perla Ovitch telling them how much she needed to understand what had happened to her.
Perla and the rest of the Ovitz family lived in their own space in the camp, wore their own clothes and enjoyed a peculiar "protection", which they "paid for", however, very dearly a little later in Mengele's experiment rooms. Their physical deformity had fired his imagination and he subjected them to painful experiments in order to learn the "secrets" of their genetics.
They all survived and continued to live together. Until death, as their mother had advised them. Perla Ovitz, the last of the Lilliput Troupe, died in Haifa on September 9, 2001. But not the story of the "7 dwarfs of Auschwitz" who "were not under the supervision of a benevolent Snow White, but a heartless monster. ..''
Source: newsbeast website, 10.2.16