In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe--A Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust

From Publishers Weekly
When the last of his 10 children was born in 1921, Shimshon Eizik Ovitz had the distinction of having fathered the largest dwarf family in the world. Twenty-four years later, his seven dwarf children, two of their normal-sized siblings and a handful of their spouses and cousins set a more tragic record as one of only two extended families to survive Auschwitz intact. The same physical characteristics that frequently rendered them helpless made them endlessly appealing to the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, who tormented them in the name of genetic research. The Ovitz family history is fascinating, as is the dwarf lore that Israeli journalists Koren and Negev have unearthed, but the real drama—aside from the horror of the Holocaust—is in the relationships the Ovitzes formed with Mengele as well as with one another, their spouses, extended family and with the Slomowitzes, fellow townspeople who pretended to be relatives so that they, too, would be spared. Much of the family history comes from the last surviving Ovitz daughter, Perla, who died in 2001, and her nephew, Shimshon, who was a toddler in Auschwitz. Perla is a compelling blend of pride and misery, her nephew a sorrowful adult whose difficult childhood was followed by a troubled adolescence. Their stories, and those of their family, are unique and unforgettable. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
The Ovitz family--seven dwarfs and three normal-statured siblings--traveled through Transylvania and neighboring lands singing songs for enthusiastic audiences in the 1930s and early 1940s. Then in 1944, they were shipped with thousands of other Jews to Auschwitz, where the infamous Dr. Mengele took an interest in them. Saved from immediate murder by Mengele, they were treated far better than the average resident of Auschwitz. Although forced to suffer through painful and humiliating medical tests, they kept their own clothes and were better fed than others at the camp. They survived Mengele's experiments, eventually moving to Israel and going on a successful reunion tour before retiring to run a cinema together. Employing information culled from interviews with friends and the last surviving Ovitz sister, Koren and Negev explore with considerable depth the Ovitzes' complicated relationships with their size; one another; and their awful savior, Mengele. The sometimes melodramatic writing detracts a bit from the inherently powerful story, but this is a quirky, illuminating addition to Holocaust history. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


New York Review of Books, March 10, 2005
"Amazing story sympathetically and eloquently told". Professor Istvan Deak, New York Review of Books March 2005.


Book Description
In this remarkable, never-before-told account of the Ovitz family, seven of whose ten members were dwarves, readers bear witness to the terrible irony of the Ovitz’s fate: being burdened with dwarfism helped them to endure the Holocaust. Through research and interviews with the youngest Ovitz daughter, Perla, the troupe’s last surviving member, and other relatives, the authors weave the tale of a beloved and successful family of performers who were famous entertainers in Central Europe until the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz in May 1944. Descending into the hell of the concentration camp from the transport train, the Ovitz family—known widely as the Lilliput Troupe— was separated from other Jewish victims. When Josef Mengele was notified of their arrival, they were assigned better quarters and provided more nutritious food than other inmates. Authors Koren and Negev chronicle Mengele’s experiments upon this family and the creepy fondness he developed for them. Finally liberated by Russian troops, the family eventually found their way to a new home in Israel where they became wealthy and successful performers. In Our Hearts We Were Giants is a powerful testament to the human spirit, and a triumphant tale that no reader will forget. Photographs are included.


Excerpted from In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupeãa Dwarf Familyªs Survival of the Holocaust by Yehuda Koren, Eilat Negev. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
That night, there was a bang on the Ovitzes’ door. With great apprehension they answered it—and discovered a rowdy group of tipsy police standing before them with guns, bayonets, and bottles. The frightened dwarfs stood aside to let them in. The men in uniform slumped onto the red velvet sofa: "Let’s have some fun!" they demanded. Bewildered, the Lilliput Troupe took out their instruments, arranged themselves in a corner, and hesitantly started to play and sing. The drunken police joined in. Clapping ecstatically, they commanded the dwarfs to play their favorite songs again and again. Occasionally one of the officers would pull himself up and, swaying heavily, lift Elizabeth or Perla or Rozika away from her instrument and try to dance. "Not long before they had been a paying audience," Perla Ovitz recalled. "Now they had us for free. They wanted us to drink with them, but we explained we’d be too sick to play. They were away from home, longing for a woman, so again and again they demanded love serenades. I was in no mood for romance, all I wanted was to cry, but we had no choice. When they left at dawn, we were shattered, humiliated. We couldn’t help thinking, what does our whole miserable community locked up in the synagogue next door think of the merry sounds coming from our home." And every night of the following week, the scene was repeated. The dwarfs felt vulnerable without the barriers of the proscenium arch, the stage, the lights, the curtains. But they realized that once again their deformity was playing to their advantage.


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The true story of seven dwarves, a family of performers who survived the Holocaust. The Ovitzes were one of only two families whose members all returned from Auschwitz, and to call that remarkable hardly does justice to their saga, related by Israeli journalists Koren and Negev in a number of different tones. It starts with the musicality of a fairy tale, recounting the life of Shimshon Eizik Ovitz, a dwarf born in 1868 to Jewish parents in Transylvania. Shimshon became a Badchan: "a merrymaker, a colorful, virtually indispensable figure at wedding festivals," the authors explain, purveyor of "drollery, riddles, and anecdotes." Of his ten children from two wives, seven were dwarves. Nine of them joined together in a vaudeville act called the Lilliput Troupe, expanding on their father's repertoire to include love songs and local hits, broad jokes and comic scenes. In 1944 the family was shipped to Auschwitz. The narrative's tone takes an emotional nosedive as the authors chronicle month by month the Ovitzes' experiences in the camp, where they were taken under Dr. Josef Mengele's protective wing (an oxymoronic phrase if ever there was one). Mengele considered the Ovitzes a eugenic gold mine: "Their desirability lay in their number and in their anomaly as an entire family." They were abused and degraded, but they were also housed in one of the "family camps," showcases for the Red Cross. They surrendered buckets of blood to Mengele, but each and every one survived, and here the story takes a more upbeat tone. After returning to an unfriendly Hungary, the Ovitzes traveled together, ultimately to Israel, where they resumed their careers and made a success despite the Yiddish character oftheir act "in a land where Yiddish was frowned upon, where the old culture was scorned and the folk traditions banished." They were survivors all over again. Horrifying yet mesmerizing: the authors never overplay a potentially melodramatic hand, and no reader will fail to admire the Ovitzes. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Agent: Alison Bond


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