When I was researching “Little People,” my book about dwarfism, one of the things I learned was that Josef Mengele was dumb as a rock. His experiments were not just crimes against humanity; they were also completely unscientific. He became a Nazi because it offered a chance for career advancement that wasn’t otherwise available to him.
This review by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker gets into all of that.
I know this because I was looking into the Ovitz family, a troupe of Hungarian-Jewish dwarf entertainers who were saved by Mengele, but who suffered horribly, after they were sent to Auschwitz. Incredibly, all of them survived.
There is so much to think about following President Trump’s illegal, un-American ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries. I’ll be attending the Copley Square rally later today that’s being organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and will write about it for WGBH News.
For now, let me comment on a small piece of this. As I’m sure you know, Trump issued his executive order on Holocaust Remembrance Day, thus turning the nation’s back on a new generation of refugees at the same time that he was commemorating one of history’s most terrible events. And his statement regarding the Holocaust made no mention of the Jews because, you know, others suffered too.
In my first book, “Little People,” I explored a longstanding belief among people in the dwarfism community that Hitler rounded up all the dwarfs and had them killed. What I found actually reinforced the uniquely Jewish character of the Holocaust. In fact, dwarfs were largely left alone by the Nazis. Some may have been caught up in Hitler’s campaign to eradicate people with severe disabilities, but most people with dwarfism are healthy and ambulatory, and thus did not run afoul of the Nazi killing machine.
Members of the Ovitz family — dwarf entertainers from Hungary — even recalled being helped onto trains by German soldiers. But then it was discovered that they were Jews. They were shipped off to Auschwitz, where they became the subjects of Josef Mengele’s unimaginably cruel experiments. Incredibly, all of them survived.
You can read my chapter on dwarfs and the Holocaust by clicking here.
The Daily Mail has published a lengthy excerpt from a new book about the Ovitz family, a troupe of seven dwarf entertainers from Hungary who were shipped off to Auschwitz and subjected to horrendous torture at the hands of Josef Mengele after it was discovered that they were Jewish.
I wrote about the Ovitzes in my book about dwarfism, “Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter’s Eyes.” There’s a longish section about them toward the end of Chapter 4. I had seen a documentary about the Ovitzes at the Little People of America national conference in 2002, which prompted me to do some additional research.
One of my findings was that Nazis, contrary to what many people within the dwarf community believed, had not targeted people with dwarfism for elimination — unless they were Jews. Indeed, what happened to the Ovitzes underscored the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust.
In the documentary, “Liebe Perla” (“Dear Perla”), Perla Ovtiz recalls that she and her family had continued to tour Europe and perform even after the outbreak of World War II. She remembers a time before their Jewish identity was discovered when “the Nazis gave us a hand, lifted us onto the packed train and helped us find some space.”
Though being Jews landed them in Auschwitz, being dwarfs kept them alive, as Mengele wanted to keep them around for his sick experiments. Another Jewish dwarf, Alexander Katan, was not so lucky. At the Mauthausen concentration camp, he was killed, and his flesh was stripped off his skeleton so that it could be displayed. Koren and Negev write that the Ovitzes feared a similar fate.
Incredibly, well into her later years of life Perla Ovitz remained on some level grateful that Mengele had saved her and her siblings. In “Liebe Perle,” she tells the filmmaker that she cried when she learned Mengele had died in Uruguay. “I can’t say anything bad about him,” she says. Truly a horrible and complicated tale.
