Gas chamberIn the article in the first post of this thread that was published in The Daily Mail in 2003, they made it seem like the dwarfs were placed inside an actual gas chamber, and they wrote that the dwarfs were vomiting when they were rescued from the gas chamber:
> But in the chaos, they were dragged straight to the gas chamber. 'We were standing naked, men and women, when the heavy metal door slammed behind us and we started smelling the gas pouring in,' Perla recalled.
> 'Suddenly, through the fog, we heard shouts. "The dwarfs! Where are the dwarfs?"' Vomiting from the gas, they were freed.
The book about the dwarfs by Koren and Negev was first published in German in 2003 under the title "Im Herzen waren wir Riesen: die Überlebensgeschichte einer Liliputanerfamilie". In 2004, the book was published in English as "In our hearts we were giants: the remarkable story of the Lilliput Troupe: a dwarf family's survival of the Holocaust". In 2013, the book was republished with minor changes under the title "Giants: the Dwarfs of Auschwitz: The Extraordinary Story of the Lilliput Troupe". [
https://libgen.lc/index.php?req=dwarfs+auschwitz]
I didn't find the text of the original German edition online, but in the first English edition of the book from 2004, they said that the dwarfs were probably placed inside a disinfectation chamber and not a gas chamber, and now they didn't mention anything about vomiting:
> A black army truck pulled up to the hushed group of the Ovitzes. Simon Slomowitz and his son helped everyone get up onto the bed of the truck. They were all sitting on the metal floor, so they couldn't see where they were going. The truck stopped. Their bones creaking, they dismounted, and an officer led them into a building. A pungent odor assaulted them. Hooks with numbers were attached to the walls; there were wooden benches to sit on. They were the only ones inside, all twenty-two of them. "Take off your clothes!" the officer bellowed. Then, in the anxious silence, everyone looked to the seven Lilliputs for guidance. "We are Orthodox Jews and can't undress together, men and women, brothers in front of sisters," pleaded Avram Ovitz. The officer was impatient. They knew they had better not argue. Averting their eyes from each other, they shed layer after layer of their clothes. Judah Slomowitz was eleven at the time: "I had never seen a naked woman before and I was bewildered and intrigued with so many of them around me: my mother, my sisters, the dwarf ladies. It excited me to embarrassment. I couldn't help myself, and burst out laughing."
> A heavy door opened and the wave of heat that escaped assailed their faces. They had barely crossed the threshold when the door slammed behind them. _It was almost dark and we stood in what looked like a large washing room, waiting for something to happen. We looked up to the ceiling to see why the water was not coming. Suddenly we smelt gas. We gasped heavily, some of us fainting on the floor. With our last breath we cried out. Minutes passed, or maybe just seconds, then we heard an angry voice from outside: "Where is my dwarf family?!" The door opened, and we saw Dr. Mengele standing there. He ordered us carried out, and had cold water poured on us to revive us._ Those minutes or seconds indelibly etched the imminence of death on the memory of sister Elizabeth and the three Slomowitz sons, Mordechai, Joseph, and Judah. They all testified separately that they were beginning to be gassed - and that everyone would have died if Mengele had not suddenly reappeared.
> Nevertheless, the story's verification with specialists and relevant documentary evidence suggests it is unlikely any gassing was scheduled for the Ovitz group that day. The gas chambers were designed to kill between five hundred and two thousand people at once, depending on the size of the hall. Zyklon B was effective only in a room temperature of 27 degrees Celsius, which was achieved by cramping a mass of people into inadequate space. Gas chambers were simply not operated for twenty-two people; small groups were shot. Furthermore, according to the camp's rigid safety orders, the SS personnel had to wear gas masks when operating Zyklon B. Although the victims died within fifteen minutes, the SS men routinely waited half an hour before turning on the powerful fans that dispersed the gas from inside the chamber. Only then were the doors opened. The operators themselves did not enter; instead, Jewish inmates from the _Sonderkommando_ were sent in to drag out the bodies for cremation.
> Consequently, if the Ovitz group had been consigned to a gas chamber, once the extermination process had begun, it could not have been halted, as by then it would have been impossible to open the doors. What seems more likely is that the Lilliputs had been taken to the camp sauna for disinfection, where the water poured over heated stones would have produced much steam and fumes as well as temperatures intense enough to open wounds and cause someone to faint. The sauna would have had a particularly traumatic effect on both small children and fragile dwarfs - an effect that might easily have created the impression of being gassed.
> In any case, the twenty-two members of the Ovitz group returned to the dressing room, where they lay on the benches until they regained their senses. They were exempted from the sauna's second phase, in which they would have been forcibly shoved into the next hall to shower in ice-cold water and then to towel-dry with ten people to one flimsy towel. They were also spared the invasive search of all bodily orifices for gold or jewelry. Contrary to standard procedure, the Ovitzes were given their own clothes back, after they'd been disinfected. It was a practical move on the part of Mengele, a seasoned laboratory scientist, who cared for his human subjects the way he did his lab rats, according to their particular needs. And Mengele realized they needed their own, specially sewn clothing. To dress them in clothes that had been stockpiled after being stripped from some of the hundreds of thousands of children murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau simply would not do: though Lilliputian in height, the Ovitzes had the bodies of adults, with breasts and curves and wide bottoms.
The quotation above says that water was poured over heated stones in the disinfectation sauna. However Pressac wrote that "the building of a disinfection and disinfestation centre subsequently to be called the 'Zentral Sauna,' a building that was a sauna only in name". [
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0065.shtml]
Also the testimony quoted above said that "suddenly we smelt gas", which doesn't seem consistent with the explanation that the dwarfs were placed inside a disinfectation chamber which employed hot air or steam. Pressac wrote: [ibid.]
> These operations as carried out at the Zentral Sauna were described in a letter sent to the Auschwitz Museum by a Czech former prisoner:
> (Summary)
> The procedures used were:
> 1. Hot air: Large and heavy effects, such as coats, outer clothing, etc.;
> 2. Steam: "light" effects, such as underclothes, shirts and any type of clothing considered as light, for example the "Zebra-Kleider," prison uniforms. Blankets were also included in this group
> 3. Other: Leather objects, such as shoes, belts. etc. were disinfected using Karbol, Lysol or water containing hydrocyanic acid, a mixture obtained by pouring Zyklon-B crystals into the water.
Excerpts from "Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz"> In the service of Professor von Verschuer, Mengele was collecting twins, but he was also using his long, diligent shifts on the ramp to select unusual and striking human mutations. Like a demonic impresario casting the ultimate freak show, he plucked out from the masses hunchbacks, pinheads, hermaphrodites, giants, dwarfs, extraordinarily obese men, grotesquely corpulent women and anyone else suffering from a growth disorder. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, an inmate in the Birkenau infirmary, recalls that:
> > Mengele loved to single out those who had not been created in God's image. He once brought a woman to our area who had two noses; another time a girl of about ten who had sheep's wool on her head instead of hair; on another occasion, he brought a woman who had donkey ears.
^ I didn't find any other source which mentioned that Mengele also selected pinheads on the ramp. The quotation by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk is from a chapter about the Ovitz dwarfs from the book "Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land" from 1985. [
https://books.google.com/books?id=f6x5ZrhDR3MC&pg=PA89,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11KII22nNQNpN6Xye7v1POk62bigikFkk]
> Contrary to most testimonies by Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors, that Mengele was the one who personally selected them, it is clear that he could not have been on the ramp day and night, week after week. On the night the Lilliputs arrived at Birkenau, Mengele was fast asleep in his room at the nearby SS headquarters. All the troopers on duty at the ramp, however, well knew his passion, his collector's mentality. To gain favour with the freak-hunter, they were always on the lookout for new specimens to enrich his 'human circus'. While a lone dwarf did not provide reason enough to knock on Mengele's door in the middle of the night, seven dwarfs, along with their tall, normal-sized siblings, seemed to be a good cause for disturbance.
^ One realistic feature in the story of the dwarfs is that they didn't claim that Mengele personally selected them on the ramp. In his biography of Mengele, David Marwell wrote that " 'Almost all inmates' at Auschwitz, according to Zofka, maintain that they had been selected by Mengele." Marwell also wrote that "Geoffrey Hartmann, who wrote extensively on survivor testimony, observed that 'every Auschwitz survivor seems to have gone through a selection by Mengele, as if he manned his post 24 hours a day.' In fact, Mengele took his turn at 'ramp duty' like the rest of the medical staff in the camp. There is no evidence that he served there more frequently or for longer hours than his colleagues."
> Lunch was either a watery soup made of potato and a few leaves of cabbage, or else roots, the sort normally fed to cattle, that had been boiled in a huge vat of water. The quantities were meagre, and Perla found the taste nauseating, rancid with the smell of rotten vegetables and more suspicious substances - some sort of poison, she feared. 'Once when they poured us soup, I saw worms crawling in the bowl.' There were bits of glass, buttons, things looking like teeth and little fingers of children.
^ The dwarfs were fed a witches' brew straight out of a fairytale.
> They were constantly, severely fatigued from the loss of blood.
> > He gave us some porridge, baby food, but we had passed the age and hunger drove us crazy. The children were always crying for food.
^ The dwarfs were starving because they didn't want to eat porridge because they were not babies.
> Every day the Lilliputs groomed themselves, scrubbing and brushing each other for hours in preparation for their summons to Mengele's cabinet. They dressed up in their finery, powdered their faces and rouged their cheeks. Make-up had always been essential to them and they'd had the forethought to ferret some away in their pockets when they boarded the train to Auschwitz. They could stroke in a black line along the lids of their eyes, and they could pout their lips and colour them red.
^ Despite everything, the dwarfs spent hours each day grooming themselves.
> No special forms were printed for the experiments, and Mengele had to use the standard medical forms issued by the 'Hygienic Bacteriologic Laboratories of the Waffen-SS' for the soldiers' sick parade. By the entry for 'SS rank and number', he filled in the name of the prisoner and his Birkenau number; by the entry for 'clinical diagnosis', he wrote Zwerge (dwarf); and by the entry for 'address of transmitting office', he indicated the sub-camp and barrack where the Lilliput group was sequestered. He personally signed each lab form with his flamboyant signature, followed by his full rank. The forms indicate that the Lilliput blood samples were sent to the laboratory of the SS-Hygiene Institute in block 10 of Auschwitz. Far from recording any effort to break the genetic code for dwarfism, the surviving forms reflect, instead, the routine healthcare procedures of the 1940s: the laboratory checked the blood for 'Takata-Ara' and 'Rest-NaCl' as well as vitamin C, in order to trace kidney problems, liver function and typhus.
^ Based on actual wartime documents about Mengele's experiments, the experiments always seem mundane.
> Not happy with Gottlieb's apparent preference for good-looking Gypsies, Mengele himself chose Dina's next set of models: a selection of elderly women and men. She got the impression that the doctor wanted simply to acquire visual documentation to support his racial theory, as Dina's series of eleven Gypsy portraits were intended to illustrate the book that Mengele was hoping to write.
^ In his biography of Mengele, Marwell also wrote that Mengele was planning to write a book about the physical anthropology of gypsies: "Mengele had a special interest in Gypsies and took advantage of not only the twins who could be found among them but also the anthropological insights they offered. Inmate artist Dina Gottlieb, whom Mengele enlisted to paint portraits of his Gypsy research subjects, described Mengele's intense focus on them and suggested a possible explanation"; followed by the blockquote "He showed me the differences between types of Gypsies: how in the Aryan type the hairline matched the line of the eyes, how the blue of the Gypsies’ eyes was different from the Aryans’ blue, and which color was deepest. He was using these experiments to gather material for a book on the physical similarities and characteristics of Gypsies from different countries. He talked about it constantly."
> Once Dr Puzyna had completed the initial round of anthropometric measurements, Feld was examined by a team of specialists: an internist, a neurologist, a psychiatrist, an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist, a surgeon, a urologist, and an ear, nose and throat man - all of them prisoners, of different nationalities. While Mengele reviewed all the results, he himself conducted none of the actual examinations. According to Feld, Mengele behaved properly and politely during his visits; he even offered the dwarfs cigarettes.
^ When survivors tell of fantastical experiments which took place at Auschwitz, the experiments are often conducted by Mengele personally. But in reality, the medical examinations were usually performed by Mengele's staff, so for example anthropological measurements were performed by his assistant Martina Puzyna.
> Feld had to deliver all his paintings to Mengele because any form of creative self-expression by inmates - writing, painting - was forbidden and punishable by death. But Feld, however, furtively tore small pieces of paper from Mengele's allotment and sketched scenes of camp life that he then hid under the mattress.
^ Apparently it was punishable by death for the inmates to write or paint, even though it's not clear here if the claim was made by Feld or by the authors of the book.
> On 23 June 1944, an International Red Cross delegation had visited the ghetto of Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, to investigate reports that the Jews there were being transported for extermination. The delegation was scheduled to proceed next to Poland in order to inspect the Czechoslovakian 'Family Camp' at Birkenau. The Red Cross delegates had been highly impressed by the showcase Jewish habitat of Theresienstadt, especially when they were shown postcards written by former residents of Theresienstadt affirming that everyone was alive and well in Auschwitz-Birkenau. What the delegates didn't know was that the postcards had been written under duress just a few hours before their authors were gassed. Also, the cards were all dated two weeks after the gassing. The International Red Cross decided that with everything being so satisfactory, a trip to Poland was an unnecessary investment of time and energy. The Germans no longer had to fear an inspection of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Further camouflage became unnecessary and the liquidation of the 10,000 inmates of the 'Family Camp' could begin.
^ This is how the Nazis managed to trick the Red Cross.
> Before leaving, he put four cigarettes in my pocket. In my village it was unheard of for a Jewish girl to smoke, so after returning to the barrack, I traded them for a piece of pork fat. But since on religious grounds I couldn't use that either, I tried for another exchange. The only thing I managed to get was a small onion. Everyone told me I had been cheated.
^ This dwarf had such poor merchant skills that she doesn't deserve to be called a Jew.
> The last two weeks of August were particularly terrible. The surviving medical records at the Auschwitz State Museum archive show that starting in the middle of the month the Lilliput group had to endure an increasing number of tests. On 16 August, Simon Slomowitz and his three sons were taken to the clinic with Avram and Micki Ovitz. Blood was drawn for a variety of tests, including syphilis. Two days later, the five dwarf sisters underwent the same tests. On 21 August, eight-year-old Batia Ovitz was driven alone to the X-ray lab in Auschwitz. The next day, a syphilis test was administered on two Slomowitz girls, their mother, and Leah and Dora - all of them average height. Two days later, it was the turn of baby Shimshon and Batia, as well as Elizabeth and Sarah. On 29 August, the four female dwarfs, excluding Perla, were summoned again.
> With so many tests, they feared they were entering a new, far more brutal and agonising phase in the research. Or worse, that Mengele was terminating his project and that they would soon be killed. One day, at the end of August, Mengele brought Dina Gottlieb a huge roll of paper. It was so long that she could not spread it open inside the clinic. She took it outside and stretched it out on the ground, holding the corners down with stones. Then, crawling along it, she enlarged various charts, and mapped out an extremely complex family tree. She filled the square frames with names, years and gender, as well as symbols - some large, some small - next to each name.
^ When the book quotes actual wartime documents, it gives a mundane impression of the experiments that the dwarfs were subjected to.
> According to inmate-pathologist Nyiszli, however, Mengele was aiming not only 'to discover the biological and pathological causes of the birth of dwarfs and giants' but also to demonstrate that 'in the course of its long history, the Jewish race had degenerated into a people of dwarfs and cripples'.
^ Whenever the book quotes Nyiszli, you can expect something ridiculous to come out of his mouth.
> According to anthropologist Martina Puzyna, 'It cannot be said that research on twins was a Nazi idea alone. It has always played an important role in anthropology.' Mengele's research on heredity in twins and dwarfs, then, was in line with accepted anthropological methods of his time; in Puzyna's view, what gave him a singular scientific advantage was the unlimited human pool at his disposal in Auschwitz. Thus, he could conduct his research 'on a big scale, to gain results by statistical methods, with acceptable values', she testified.
^ However Puzyna presents a more realistic image of Mengele's research.
> To take some joy in the last days of summer, a football game was organised at the men's infirmary one afternoon. Two teams of twin boys were kicking the ball, to the cheers of the crowd. Judah and Joseph Slomowitz were among the players, and their father and brother encouraged them from the touchline. Avram and Micki Ovitz watched the game from their small stools.
^ The soccer field in Birkenau was next to the hospital in sector BIIf.
> As Mordechai Slomowitz told us,
> > Dr Thilo selected dozens of twin children, as well as Avram and Micki Ovitz and my two young brothers, who were eleven and thirteen. They were all put aside in the barrack. The double portion of food brought in that evening was a sign they were doomed. The Nazis wanted you to gain weight so you could burn more quickly. My father and I decided that when the truck to the crematorium arrived, we would mount it as well. The SS wouldn't mind killing another two.
^ The Nazis fattened up the inmates so they would burn more quickly.
> In the arrest warrant and indictment issued in Frankfurt am Main in January 1981 by the twenty-second criminal division of the Frankfurt Landgericht, Mengele was charged in absentia with having sent 328 children to the gas chambers on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year's festival - in 1944. In addition, the charge read, during the fast of Yom Kippur a week later, 'he hung a batten between the goal posts of a football pitch' and 'approximately 1,000 children under the required height' were sent on to their deaths.
^ The book "The Nazi Doctors" by Lifton also says that "Mengele fed his legend by dramatizing murderous policies, such as his drawing a line on the wall of the children's block between 150 and 156 centimeters (about 5 feet or 5 feet 2 inches) from the floor, and sending those whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber."
> The Lilliputs also made an impression on inmates who had previously never heard of them. When testifying about Mengele's atrocities before the public prosecutor in Frankfurt twenty-five years later, a number of survivors recalled seeing dwarfs in the camp. Nurse Regina Teresa Krzyzanowska remembered the 'Lilliputians who were in block 23 and came to the camp from Hungary. They were whole families. They were circus artists and tried to stage a few shows.' In her memoir Sursis pour l'Orchestre, Fania Fénelon, a singer in the Auschwitz women's orchestra, speaks of '[dwarfs] jumping, doing acrobatics, shrieking at the top of their voices; there was a banal scene of clowns, their chubby little hands slapping ridiculously: what a pathetic sight'. The recurrent mistaken notion that the Ovitzes were circus performers may have arisen from the tradition that stereotypes dwarf artists as clowns and jesters. The Lilliput Troupe's style of performance was, by necessity as well as choice, far removed from clowning - their bowed legs and short, weak arms prevented them from doing any acrobatics whatsoever.
^ Some eyewitnesses remember that the dwarfs performed acrobatic tricks or circus shows.
> Leah Nishri notes that
> ...
> > In my curiosity, I followed them back to their barrack, where they had a room for themselves, private and very spacious. Another dwarf lady appeared - decades later I recognised her on TV and learned that her name was Perla Ovitz. She was wearing a reddish-brown leather coat, padded with fur. A tall woman was walking behind her, carrying a bucket filled with potatoes. One potato was an unattainable dream to us, but a full bucket? In the camp I had never seen such a quantity. Perla was walking proudly, like an elegant lady returning with her servant from shopping. No other Jew in the camp walked with so much self-assurance. It seemed these people could get whatever they wished.
> Mengele's painter, Dina Gottlieb, gained a similar impression:
> > They did not look trapped like we did. They seemed hopeful and cheerful unlike the rest of us, who were frightened and pessimistic. It seemed they did not believe they'd be killed. They had a very good life before the war as VIPs, and continued to see themselves as special and privileged.
^ Other camp members remembered that the Lilliput Troupe acted like divas.
> Living in the same barrack as the dwarfs, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk was less than admiring. In her memoir _Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land_, she derides them for their endless prattle about Mengele:
> > 'How beautiful he is, how kind,' they repeated it every minute. 'How fortunate that he became our protector. How good of him to ask if we have everything.' They almost melted in adoration. They were accustomed to exposing themselves in public, and this was like another show for them.
> One afternoon, continues Nomberg-Przytyk, Mengele entered the barrack, and
> > we all stood at attention, including the midgets. Next to them, we looked like giants. He looked at them very closely. Then one of them stepped out of the row and fell at his boots. She was just about as tall as his boots. She hugged it with feeling and started to kiss it. 'You are so kind, so gorgeous. God should reward you,' she whispered, enraptured. He did not move for a minute, then he simply shook her off his boots. She fell. She lay there, tiny, spread out on the floor.
> Perla Ovitz firmly denies that such an incident ever occurred.
> > Dr Mengele never yelled or swore at us and, God forbid, never hit us. We all knew he was ruthless and capable of the worst forms of sadistic behaviour - that when he was angry he would become hysterical and literally shake from rage. But even if he were in a bad mood to begin with, the moment he stepped into our room he would immediately calm down, becoming a well-behaved boy. When he was in a good mood people would say, 'he probably visited the little ones'.
> And prisoner-doctor Katarzyna Łaniewska seems to confirm this: 'Mengele would often come to barrack 23 where the dwarfs were living, to chat with them and even crack jokes.'
^ The quotation from Nomberg-Przytyk above said that one of the dwarfs was just about as tall as Mengele's boots. In her book, she also wrote that the dwarfs were about 50 cm tall: "The father of the family was a midget, and the mother was a tall, strong woman. She had borne only midgets: three daughters and three sons. The women had normal nicely shaped heads and curly hair. They spoke good German in a clear, bright voice. Their height, about fifty centimeters, did not bother them."
> And Perla was aware of the Devil's charm:
> > Dr Mengele was like a movie star, only more good looking - he could have got prizes for his good looks. Anyone could easily fall in love with him. Nobody who saw him could imagine that behind his beautiful face a beast was hiding. He was a beautiful beast. Among ourselves we always asked how a man like that could become a Nazi.
> In return, Mengele praised the Lilliputs for their appearance. Perla recalls the sorts of compliments he would offer Frieda - the prettiest of them all - and her replies:
> > 'How beautiful you look today!' Mengele would say.
> > 'I knew that Herr Hauptsturmführer was coming, so I took great care to make myself up in his honour.'
> > 'If it was indeed for me, do continue to do so. But tell me, before arriving in Birkenau, did you also put on make-up every day?'
> > 'Of course I did, I'm an actress!'
> If Dr Mengele was not satisfied with Frieda's make-up, he would inquire, 'Are you in a bad mood today? Why didn't you apply your beautiful red lipstick?' Once he said to my sister Elizabeth, 'You've lost weight. That's not good!' When I heard this I panicked and started to cry, knowing that when he said 'it's not good', it had only one meaning: 'To the ovens!' 'Why are you crying?' he asked me. I said, 'Because Herr Hauptsturmführer said "it's not good".' Dr Mengele lifted his hand. 'Don't worry.'
^ Even here they had to insert the ovens.
> Doctors were employed in the camp clinics and laboratories; musicians played in one of the three camp orchestras - all of them applauded by Mengele, the music lover who whistled arias from Verdi and Wagner while carrying out the selections. For the Lilliputs, he composed a special couplet that he often sang to them:
> > _Auf den sieben Bergen
> > Habe ich sieben Zwergen._
> > Behind seven hills
> > I have seven dwarfs.
> In the world of fairy tales, dwarfs always lived behind _sieben Bergen_ - seven mountains - but Mengele was also punning here on the proper noun _Siebenbürgen_, the German name for Transylvania, the region the Ovitzes came from. Because the dwarfs tried hard to please him, he composed another couplet for them:
> > _Die ungarischen jüdischen Zwerge
> > geschützte Häftlinge._
> > The Hungarian-Jewish dwarfs
> > are excellent prisoners.
> When he asked them to sing for him, they were reluctant, as they were afraid of what the other inmates might think. 'We don't have our full orchestra with us,' they protested. 'If I can sing a capella, so can you,' Mengele answered, and to prove it he hummed a line from a Hungarian Gypsy song that had been making the rounds of the restaurants in central Europe: 'There's only one girl in the world for me.' His joviality somehow injecting confidence into them, for a moment they felt safe in his hands and, as a token, they sang him one of their favourites: 'Come make me happy.'
> One day while chatting with the dwarfs, Mengele let slip that ever since childhood he had loved the Grimm Brothers' Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never, though, had he imagined such a real-life encounter.
> ...
> 'Forgive me for asking, Your Excellency, but when will this all be over so we can go home?' asked Frieda, with all the charm she could conjure up.
> 'What do you mean, _meine Liebe_? Don't I have a family that I want to see? I can't go home myself!' Mengele raised his voice. 'I'm not working here for pleasure but under orders. You've got nothing to complain about! As long as you're here with me you're better off!'
^ I don't know if this actually happened, because part of the Mengele lore is that Mengele was at other times like an angel and at other times like the devil.
> SS guards often had Dina Gottlieb draw poster-size portraits from photos of their wives, fiancées and girlfriends, which they hung by their beds. Once, she was handed a postcard of a naked red-haired nymph sitting by a waterfall and was ordered to paint a life-size copy of it by the following morning. She worked frantically the whole night. 'A day later, the SS man brought it back for repairs - there were holes torn into the strategic body parts,' she recalls.
^ This is what they had to do before there was hentai.
> Eighteen-year-old Abraham Cykiert was among the few permitted to watch the games. Something of a wunderkind in his home town of Łódź, he had been accepted into the local Yiddish Writers' Association at the age of fourteen, after publishing only three poems.
> ...
> He waited one day outside the _Schreibstube_ and ambushed one of the clerks: 'I'm a poet, can you lend me a pencil and paper?' Startled by the youth's innocent recklessness, the clerk furtively and surprisingly obliged. That night, words rushed from Cykiert's mind onto paper and in the morning he searched out his benefactor. The clerk's face was mask-like as he read the poem; Cykiert could not tell if he understood a word. 'Can you also write left-handed poetry?' asked the clerk, to the young man's incomprehension. He then pulled out a sheet of paper filled with jottings and scribbles, and handed it to Cykiert. The young poet blushed as he read gutter-rhymes, obscenities and abominations. 'Try it,' said the clerk.
> The next day, Cykiert showed him his latest creation. The clerk was so pleased that he paid the teenager with a hot bowl of soup. 'Can you recite as well as you write?' he asked. Cykiert nodded.
> The following night, he took me to the weekly binge of all the inmate-VIPs in the camp: veteran prisoners who assisted the SS in running the place. They were sitting around a table laden with delicacies: cheese, sardines, sausage, fruit. The alcohol flowed freely. There were other inmate-performers with me: singers, actors, musicians. We performed from the back of the room as they devoured the food. We were not allowed to touch anything, but when the party was over we could share the leftovers. I read my pornographic lines and they rolled with laughter. I was consequently accepted as the group's permanent jester. Every week, each of us had to come with new material - to this day I'm ashamed of the poems I was forced into writing.
^ Earlier the book about the dwarfs said that "any form of creative self-expression by inmates - writing, painting - was forbidden and punishable by death". But now an inmate told a camp clerk that he was a poet and he asked for pencil and paper.
> Perla Ovitz insists that she and her family never took part in the 'night life' of the death camp: they never performed in these drunken revelries; they never sang in public; they never privately entertained parties of kapos and SS men. Yet nearly all witnesses - former fans, acquaintances and neighbours from Rozavlea who were in the camp with them, as well as inmates who shared their barrack - vividly recall the dwarfs performing for the SS. One such witness was Eta Tessler:
> > I knew the Ovitzes from Maramureş, as I was from Viseu, a nearby village. In Auschwitz I was part of the Scheisskommando. We had to collect the daily excrement of 32,000 women from the latrines, sift it into barrels and carry it outside the camp. All day long we were criss-crossing the camp, filthy and smelling, pushing the heavy cart with overloaded shit barrels. One day I came across two of the dwarf ladies. It was extremely cold, and I envied them for being able to have coats and warm pockets. I asked them where they were going and they answered 'singing'. I would run into them a few more times, walking in the same direction, but I couldn't tell if it was always the same duo or if they took turns.
^ Here again the eyewitnesses present conflicting testimony.
> Sunday 30 July was the fast of Tisha B'av, commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. On this day, Jews would cease working and gather in synagogues to lament the catastrophe, which led to a bitter exile. Being familiar with the Jewish calendar, Mengele perversely ordered the leader of the women's orchestra to prepare a special concert. He selected the programme himself: military marches, circus music, waltzes, the foxtrot. The forthcoming concert caused much excitement. The orchestra arranged extra rehearsals, not just to master the exceptional programme but to master it brilliantly enough to please the unusual guest of honour. Rows of wooden benches stretched out over the infirmary yard. Opposite the orchestra stage, a special platform was erected to hold the SS staff and their inmate-assistants, doctors, nurses and camp functionaries. In the centre of the dignitary box sat Mengele himself, the arena's emperor.
> As the orchestra struck its first notes, Fania Fenélon, one of the musicians, noticed a group of dwarfs crossing the stage in a straight line. 'It's a very famous dwarf circus from Hungary,' whispered one of her colleagues. Fenélon described the proceedings in her book:
> > We start with a foxtrot, Mengele waving his hand, the dwarfs filling the stage, some couples dancing, other participants only managing a kind of grotesque, depressing twist. The men bow with a touch of servility; the women follow. Their jewellery, silk, ornaments, glitter in the sun, igniting thousands of sparkles, dancing, swinging, intermingling. These creatures emit joyful sounds, trying to sing along with Clara, Lotte and me. They have high, shrieking voices. The orchestra plays a march, and they accompany with clapping and stamping. There is something unreal and awful about the fifty tiny hands covered with rings, the bracelets clicking on their little arms, the little legs stamping... The circus is at the foot of our stage, a circle with distorted creatures moving about, clapping like children, some of them fifty years old. The SS men burst out laughing. The young girls present at the scene start to tremble with fright at the uproar, the music, the dwarfs, the masquerade.
> Although Fenélon is wrong about their number - they were seven, not twenty-five - and despite the negative tone, she appears to offer a fairly realistic account. For her part, Perla Ovitz recalls an entirely different musical programme: romantic, melancholy German songs that moved her and her sisters to tears. She maintains adamantly that she and her family did not appear or perform onstage, that day or any other day, and insists that they watched the performance from their tiny stools in the audience.
> Against the bleak backdrop of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the evening was so vivid that it became deeply etched in the memory of many survivors. Isaac Taub was present that evening. He was part of the group of twin boys enlisted to carry chairs and benches and arrange them in rows. The children were allowed to stand at the back during the performance; afterwards, they dismantled the seats and carried them back to the depot.
> > There were about 200 spectators and it was a full, professional show, with stage lights and music. I remember that the female and male dwarfs stood onstage. If I'm not mistaken, this concert was repeated once more. We all knew that the dwarfs were performing for the Nazis, but it was nothing to be ashamed of.
> After two hours, Mengele lifted his hand and declared the concert over. Fania Fenélon recalls that 'Mengele stood in the midst of the smartly dressed dwarfs, in their grotesque outfits and jewellery. He turned to us and said, in his ironic manner, "Sie haben ein gutes Publikum" (You have a good audience).'
> All the way to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Lilliputs safeguarded their musical instruments. Everyone in the ghetto had been told that the deportation would be the start of a new life; thus, the craftsmen and professionals had taken their tools with them. But in the havoc on the ramp they were all ordered to leave their belongings on the trains. The Ovitzes were no exception. 'You'll get them later,' they had been promised. 'They were always grumbling about their little musical instruments, which had been taken from them,' recalls Dina Gottlieb. 'They asked me if I could help get them back, as they were entertainers and needed their tools.'
> Many survivors recount a surrealistic scene in which a dwarf is playing the violin in a yard between the barracks. Gitta Drettler, who had lived next door to the Ovitz family on the main street of Rozavlea, remembers being:
> > happy to see them once again in the camp. The Nazis forced them to play in the SS barracks and I could hear the music from outside. They had their tiny musical instruments, and when I met them after the war in Romania and went to hear them playing, they said, 'These are the instruments we had in Auschwitz.'
> Likewise, Maria Halina Zombirt, who had worked in the infirmary as a clerk, testified to the Frankfurt general prosecutor that she had heard the family of ten Hungarian dwarfs 'playing on musical instruments - a very peculiar piece'. Kalman Bar-On, who lived in the same barrack as Avram and Micki Ovitz, recalls that
> > I would call them 'the two Toulouse-Lautrecs'. They always boasted, 'We are an artistic troupe!' They told us they arrived with all their equipment, stressing that it had been important for them to bring their musical instruments, even at the expense of clothes and household utensils, since their whole future depended on it.
> ...
> Still, though, Perla Ovitz insisted throughout her life that neither she nor her sisters and brothers ever performed in the death camp.
> > We only sang among ourselves in our room, to remind ourselves of the good old days, have a good cry, and try and forget for a moment where we were. Everyone in the camp knew that we were artists and we could not escape from it completely. So there were occasions when one of us, from fear of being killed or from no choice, succumbed to the demand of a kitchen supervisor or SS officer and sang for a candy or a bit of margarine. But we never put on a performance, and in any case did not have our musical instruments.
^ The author of the book "The Truth about Fania Fénelon and the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau" interviewed two members of the Birkenau female orchestra, who both said that the concert on Tisha B'av was made up by Fénelon. However the quotation above says that the concert was remembered by Isaac Taub, who is a CANDLES twin who was included on a list of eyewitnesses interviewed by Negev and Koren: "We are also deeply indebted to the other survivors of Auschwitz, who selflessly put aside their own tormenting experience, to tell the tale of their co-prisoners, the dwarfs: Dina Gottlieb-Babbitt, Kalman Bar-On, Peter Grünfeld, Efraim Reichenberg, Solomon Malik, Abraham Cykiert, Gitta Drettler-Budimsky, Isaac Taub, Eta Tessler, Zvi Klein, Leah Nishri, Ibby Mann, Arie Rubin, Zipora Schaps, Moshe Offer, Sarah Wirzberger, Yona Lachs and Sarah Angel."
> 'Now tell me, how did you live with your midget?' In her memoir of Auschwitz, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk recalls Mengele posing this question to Dora, the tall, full-bodied wife of Avram Ovitz. Mengele was pressing on the common stereotype of the male dwarf as a sub-human characterised by an unusually potent sex drive and wild, unnatural desires. Dora Ovitz blushed, dumbfounded, her blood pounding in her ears. 'Speak!' screamed Mengele, and then proceeded to interrogate her, vulgarly, in front of her young daughter, her sisters-in-law and the entire barrack. Had she conceived her child with her dwarf husband, he demanded, or was the father someone else? As Dora responded by praising her husband's intelligence and industry, writes Nomberg-Przytyk,
> > we all stood there like blocks of stones.
> > 'Don't tell me about that, only about how you slept with him.'
> > Mengele was salivating. The sweat poured down her face in big drops, on her clothes. She spoke and he asked questions. I cannot repeat the conversation. It was grotesque, inhuman torture.
> At times, Mengele's sexual curiosity took him beyond such interrogations. Two pairs of identical teenage twins testified for the Frankfurt prosecution that he forced them to have sex with other twins in order to determine if the girls would bear twins in turn.
^ Mengele's life wasn't boring for sure. This story comes from the same book as the story that Mengele found a woman with two noses, a girl who had sheep's wool on her head, and a woman who had donkey ears. [
https://books.google.com/books?id=sZgLAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA91]
> 'Among us in the experimental barrack for male twins and dwarfs was a misshapen, hunchbacked gnome, a little less than four feet tall,' recalls Efraim Reichenberg.
> > He was forty years old, had a fissure in his skull and could only walk with the aid of two crutches. He had been a watchmaker in Budapest and we came together on the same transport. Each of us was enduring his own private hell, but when he let us know what he was going through, there was still room for pity. Nearly every day he was put in a room and stripped naked. The SS brought him Gypsy women infected with syphilis and forced him to have sexual intercourse with them. The SS doctors stood watching. Every morning when he arrived and at the end of the day before he left, they examined him thoroughly to see if he had already caught the disease. When he first told me I didn't want to believe him, but one day I saw him through a crack in the door. A male nurse was holding him, forcing him down on a woman because he was no longer able. The unfortunate man didn't last long - he died some time later, not of syphilis but of exhaustion.
^ I don't understand how the "forcing" worked. The story comes from Ephraim Reichenberg, who is a CANDLES member who was a plaintiff in the 1985 lawsuit by Mengele survivors. Like Eva Mozes-Kor who founded CANDLES, he said that he was not a twin but that he was mistaken as a twin because he looked similar to his sibling. His story was that he had a poor singing voice but his brother had a beautiful singing voice, so Mengele was intrigued by the difference, and he performed an experiment where he injected cancer cells into Reichenberg's neck. Now as a result of the experiment, Reichenberg had to speak through a device which made him sound like a Dalek. [
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/07/world/jerusalem-listens-to-the-victims-of-mengele.html,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V41_BeF8Qo]
> There they were killed and their bodies, still warm, were sent to SS-Hauptsturmführer Professor Dr August Hirt. He was building up a collection of skulls at the Anatomy Institute of the Reich University in Strasbourg, and was looking for 'Jewish-Bolshevik commissar types', as examples of 'a repulsive but typical species of sub-humanity'.
^ This seems like it could've actually happened.
> 'One day, the dwarfs from block 23 were taken away,' recalls Dr Katarzyna Łaniewska. 'I don't know what was done with them.' Her colleague Ella Lingens-Reiner confirms that 'after about three weeks, the family disappeared suddenly. We were convinced they had been gassed.' Another doctor, Sigmond Hirsch, a French-Jewish roentgenologist and a resistance fighter, recalls that the experiments had ended and the dwarfs had been delivered to the gas chambers. Complete strangers to the dwarfs, inmates who saw them only briefly, like Maria Gasiorowska, a block elder at the women's camp, noticed that they had 'disappeared after a relatively short period of time, about two months. Following their disappearance, which attracted attention, there was news around the camp that they had been gassed. The news came from the crematorium workers.'
> One of these was _Sonderkommando_ Philip Müller: 'The only thing I saw regarding the midgets was how they executed them. He [Mengele] killed most of them, or had them killed, in order to perform autopsies on their bodies.' Maria Halina Zombirt, who had been a clerk in charge of the sick registry, testified for the Frankfurt prosecution that she 'met a group of ten Hungarian dwarfs and was told that they were a family who performed in a restaurant. When one of them died, he was prepared and skeletonised and sent to the museum in Berlin.'
> Two survivors have gone so far as to describe the death of the dwarfs in great, appalling detail. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk remembers Mengele ordering that little Shimshon be brought to his medical cabinet. When Mengele was finished with the baby, he locked the door behind him and left. Later, as Nomberg-Przytyk tells it, Leah Ovitz arrived, and discovered a terrible scene: she
> > grabbed the half-dead child and ran into a mad frenzy of pain. Not one drop of blood was left in his little face. 'He will die. He has to die,' she said, choked with tears. At night, the little one died. He never regained consciousness. In the small room, on the little table, lay the little boy. Around him, like pillars of stone, stood a large woman, along with the child's mother, slim and frail; the three midgets sat in miniature chairs. They did not cry. They were all frightened of the torturous death awaiting them.
> In the evening, the testimony continues, the dead child was placed outside the block with the other corpses to be taken to the crematorium. Nomberg-Przytyk also claims that she witnessed the awful death of Avram Ovitz: 'The old midget wanted his wife,' and he tried to slip through the wire; a guard spotted him and, when Avram got close enough, shot him. 'He never made it to his wife.'
> But little Shimshon did not die on Mengele's operating table and he survived Birkenau. Likewise, his uncle Avram was not shot, but lived to see liberation day. What, then, caused Nomberg-Przytyk to make such basic mistakes? Most likely she was compressing a number of events, and attributed to the dwarfs two common occurrences in the daily life of the camp: the death of a child in his mother's arms and the shooting of inmates who approached the electrified fence.
> In a similar manner, the singer Fania Fenélon maintains that immediately after the concert, 'the handsome doctor was seen crossing the camp, followed by his merry, squeaking army of dwarfs'. She describes Mengele as a Pied Piper proudly marching in front, with the dwarfs - joyful, self-assured, apparently unworried - behind him. 'Who could dream of exterminating such tiny creatures, always joyful and happy! Mengele laughs with them, he seems quite amused, he - so enormous, ruling over such small ones.' Fenélon then reports that later Mengele returned alone, his hands in his pockets. She concludes her account with the words ending the opera Pagliacci by Leoncavallo: _'La Commedia e Finita!'_
> A similar reminiscence was given by Renee Firestone, an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor: 'The Germans found a community of midgets, transported them to Auschwitz, shot them en masse and then were forced to let them sit in a pile for three days until the crematoria could take them.' A mass killing of dwarfs was not registered only in the memory of camp survivors, however. Documents in the Auschwitz archives have led some researchers to conclude that Mengele killed eleven female dwarfs on 7 December 1944.
> In the 'Labour Deployment List' of 5 December 1944, under the heading 'sick and unable to work', a new category appears for the first time: _Zwerge_. It indicates that sixteen female dwarfs were transferred to the women's camp in BIIe. It had previously been the Gypsy camp, but had stood empty since the extermination of all its inhabitants in August. The transfer was part of a rearrangement of Birkenau. The prisoners were being moved into fewer barracks, as the women's camp had been liquidated. Healthy women prisoners were transferred to BIIb, while the ill, as well as female twins and dwarfs, were transferred to BIIe. Three days later, the number of female dwarfs in the roster dropped from sixteen to five; the roster does not indicate the fate of the missing eleven.
> Many researchers have tried to decipher the horror behind the figures. 'They probably died the previous day as a result of the experiments conducted on them by SS Dr Mengele,' concludes Danuta Czech, in her extensive Auschwitz research. But although any sort of death was possible in the macabre world of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is most unlikely that Mengele would have arbitrarily eliminated eleven of his carefully maintained dwarfs at one go, before he had finished his work on them. Furthermore, he considered the autopsy vital to his research and would have been well aware that Dr Nyiszli could not possibly have dealt with eleven corpses in any exacting, productive way.
> There were indeed sixteen females in the Lilliput group: the five Ovitz dwarf sisters; their two average-size sisters; Avram's wife and her eight-year-old daughter; cousin Regina; Chaya Slomowitz and her three daughters; Bassie Fischman and her mother. Since Mengele regarded them as an extended family, he moved all sixteen of them to the new accommodations in Birkenau.
> But clearly, contrary to the conclusion of the camp historians, the eleven women did not die: all sixteen lived to see the end of the war and then emigrated to Israel or the United States.
> It would seem, in fact, that the disappearance of the eleven was simply a bureaucratic error. When the sixteen females of the Lilliput group arrived at their new barrack, they were duly recorded in the camp registry as dwarfs, in accordance with Mengele's note of transfer. But on a recount three days later, the officers in BIIe noticed that only five of the women were in fact dwarfs, and the eleven other average-sized women and young girls were thus excised from the category of Zwerge. While they no longer appeared in the same slot on the list, they nonetheless continued to live in the same room as the dwarfs.
> This being the case, why is there so much testimony concerning their brutal collective murder? One plausible answer might be that Birkenau survivors, who regarded their own deliverance as miraculous, found the chances slim that someone as helpless as the dwarfs could survive. In addition, the fact that the Lilliputs were transferred several times from one side of the camp to the other caused their fellow inmates to lose touch with them and in Birkenau, when you stopped seeing someone, it could mean only one thing.
^ There's multiple eyewitnesses who have said that one or more of the dwarfs were killed.
> Though Jewish holidays were set aside for extensive killing, Christmas Eve 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau was relatively peaceful - a momentary respite from horror. Elizabeth Ovitz, escorted by her tall sister Sarah, went to wish a merry Christmas to the kitchen staff. On her way back, two SS officers stopped them and took Elizabeth into a back room while Sarah, frantic, waited outside. The officers mounted Elizabeth on a chair and demanded entertainment. Elizabeth's songs won her a shower of cellophane-wrapped candies, a piece of salami and some margarine, all of which she took back to her family. Christmas festivities were taking place in various parts of the camp. Dr Lucie Adelsberger remembers watching a party in the men's infirmary from behind the fence:
> > Physicians and nurses were allowed to strike up dance tunes with a jazz group. It was an open-air performance on the grassy area close to the wire. The women crowded around on the other side of the fence, shouting 'Bravo!' and clapping their hands. The programme was good, nothing was forbidden, no sentry shot into the crowd.
> The experience of Solomon Malik, then a fourteen-year-old twin, was even more extravagant:
> I went to a Christmas party in a large hall in the Kanada camp, near the crematoria. It was open only for camp functionaries but our kapo, Frau Schmidt, took me along with her. There was lavish food, drink, music and dance. It was a complete show: someone lifted a table with his teeth, clowns amused the crowd with their tricks. I remember that one of them rode a broomstick and laid eggs, to the cheers of the spectators. The Lilliputs were part of the artistic programme. I don't remember exactly how many of them were there, but they sang and played their tiny instruments.
^ Earlier the book quoted Perla saying that her family members never put on a musical performance at the camp, or at most "there were occasions when one of us, from fear of being killed or from no choice, succumbed to the demand of a kitchen supervisor or SS officer and sang for a candy or a bit of margarine." However now there's two eyewitnesses who remember the dwarfs performing on Christmas Eve 1944.
> 'How many dwarfs like you were in the camp?' Ludovit Feld was asked by a Lieutenant Misivrov from the military prosecution office of the Red Army, who was sent to gather evidence. 'In Birkenau where I was, we were ten Lilliputians. Five men, five women.' 'How did the doctors and the SS treat you?' 'The doctors treated us fairly but the SS laughed at us, although they never hit us. Whenever they made selections, we were kept alive.'
> This testimony from March 1945 is the earliest evidence on record relating to Mengele's research on dwarfs. It also establishes their precise number: ten. However, this is not a figure on which researchers and survivors agree. Dr Gisella Perl, for example, indicates in her book that, 'One of these barracks housed Dr Mengele's pets, Polish and Hungarian Jewish midgets, about forty of them, some alone, some with their entire family.' Some research places the figure as high as a hundred or more. Nevertheless, there were only seven dwarfs in the Lilliput group and the Ovitzes insist there were only three other dwarfs beside them.
> This figure of ten is backed up by the surviving Auschwitz archives: between May 1944 and January 1945, listed under the category Zwerge are the names and camp numbers of the seven Ovitzes, Ludovit Feld, Arthur Seligsohn and the Budapest watchmaker.
^ Does someone know where I can find the entry in the "surviving Auschwitz archives"?
> In his rivalry with Hans Grebe, Mengele lost. By the 1950s, scientists had begun to taxonomise the various types of dwarfism. In 1952, Hans Grebe, now an honoured and distinguished scientist, published his papers on a rare form of short-limb dwarfism, to which he would lend his name: the diagnostic term 'Grebe Syndrome' is used to this day. Grebe identified the syndrome after studying a pair of Brazilian sisters, aged seven and eleven. Mengele had an entire family, seven of them dwarfs, at his disposal. Had he had the time to continue his research he, too, might have identified the Ovitz type of dwarfism that would in honour bear his name. But he did not, and the credit belongs to Maroteaux and Lamy, two French physicians who defined it in 1959. They named it 'pseudoachondroplasia'.
^ A type of dwarfism ended up being named after Hans Grebe, who like Mengele worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
> The day after liberation, a Russian army film crew arrived at the camp. As the crew had missed the actual historical moment, they decided to stage it. Children always heighten the poignancy of a war story, so when Captain Alexander Vorontsov, a cameraman, chanced upon a group of Mengele's twins leaving the camp, he detained them. Dissatisfied with their randomly improvised clothing, he had them change back into striped prisoners' uniforms.
> In his search for a dramatic location, Vorontsov had found a narrow path that ran between two fences of barbed wire. He had another cameraman climb up a watchtower to get a bird's-eye view. Along the path, accompanied by nuns and nurses, the children in striped uniforms were paraded again and again; at the director's cue, they would stop and roll up their sleeves; then they'd point at the numbers tattooed on their arms to the camera. Extracts from the film are screened every half-hour at the Auschwitz State Museum.
^ The famous photo where children are shown behind barbed wire was staged by a Soviet film crew. The photo is featured in the Wikipedia article about Mengele, where the caption says that the photo was shot by "Alexander Voronzow and others in his group".
Fania FénelonThe books by Negev and Koren quoted the book "Playing for Time" by Fania Fénelon, which contains several inconsistencies according to the book "The Truth about Fania Fénelon and the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau": [
https://libgen.lc/index.php?req=fania+orchestra]
> In the German edition of _Playing for Time_, Fania includes an extra chapter titled "Happy Birthday." It is here that Fénelon grossly mischaracterizes some of the other prisoners in Birkenau, in this case the Ovitz dwarf family.
> The fascination of Josef Mengele with dwarfs and twins has been well documented. In the "Happy Birthday" chapter Fénelon describes a concert involving the Ovitz family and the women's orchestra, ostensibly organized by Mengele and specifically scheduled to coincide with and detract from the Jewish holiday Tisha B'Av. In Fania's account Mengele ordered the orchestra to prepare a special concert for which he himself selected the program: military marches, circus music, waltzes, and the foxtrot. Fania further states that Mengele ordered a special platform built for the performance so that the "dignitaries," of which Mengele was the center, could have the best view, and that the orchestra had to arrange extra rehearsals for the concert.
> Fénelon describes the beginning of the concert:
> > We start with a fox-trot, Mengele waving his hand, the dwarfs filling the stage, some couples dancing, other participants managing only a kind of grotesque depressing twist ... These creatures emit joyful sounds, trying to sing along with Clara, Lotte, and me. They have high, shrieking voices. The orchestra plays a march, and they accompany with clapping and stamping.
> > There is something unreal and awful about the fifty tiny hands covered with rings, the bracelets clicking on their little arms, the little legs stamping ... The SS men burst out laughing. The young girls present at the scene start to tremble with fright at the uproar, the music, the dwarfs, the masquerade.[133]
> Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, authors of _In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe - A Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust_, cite further Fénelon descriptions of the dwarfs as "jumping, doing acrobatics, shrieking at the top of their voices; ... a banal scene of clowns, their chubby little hands slapping ridiculously, what a pathetic sight."[134] Koren and Negev note that, Fania's stereotyping notwithstanding, the Ovitzes were not circus performers: "The Lilliput Troupe's style in performance was, by necessity as well as choice, far removed from clowning - their bowed legs and short, weak arms, prevented them from doing any acrobatics whatsoever."[135]
> One survivor of the troupe, Perla Ovitz, remembers that she and her family were taken by Mengele to an open air concert but she adamantly maintains they did not appear or perform onstage. Rather, she insists, they watched the entire performance from their stools in the audience. Also the musical program that Perla recalls was entirely different: romantic, melancholy German songs that moved her and her sisters to tears.[136]
> When asked if she remembers this specific concert, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch replies, "I have absolutely no memory of such an event. If it had taken place, I think I would remember. The Kapelle [orchestra] in its entirety certainly was NOT there! Just another Fania Phantasy!"[137]
> Likewise, when asked about this purported concert, Helena Niwirtiska responded, "I can't say anything. I have never heard about it in the camp." Helena surmises that if it did happen, it must have been in some other part of the camp, but she is sure that the three singers mentioned - Fania, Lotte and Claire - could not have taken part in it and that _most certainly_ the entire orchestra did not. She concludes, "It is still one of Fania's phantasies."[138]
> ...
> Other inconsistencies in the "Happy Birthday" chapter include inaccurate descriptions of the dwarf's demise. Indeed, as Koren and Negev note, Fania Fénelon is one of the Birkenau survivors who "describes the death of the dwarfs in great appalling detail."[142] The dwarf family was regularly submitted to blood tests and other medical experiments administered by Dr. Mengele and his staff. After some of the Ovitz male dwarfs were taken to Mengele's lab for testing, Fania noted "the handsome doctor ... crossing the camp, followed by his merry, squeaking army of dwarfs." Mengele is portrayed as a Pied Piper, proudly marching in front, with the dwarfs - joyful, self-assured, apparently unworried - behind him. "Who would dream of exterminating such tiny creatures, always joyful and happy? Mengele laughs with them, he seems quite amused, he so enormous ruling over such small ones."[143] Fénelon later reports that Mengele returned alone, his hands in his pockets, having proved himself capable of the unimaginable - murdering the dwarfs. Fania concludes "La Commedia é Finita!"[144]
> The only problem with this account is that none of these dwarfs were killed and the entire Ovitz dwarf family survived Auschwitz.[145]
> Fénelon also states as fact, inaccurate assessments of the number of dwarfs held by Mengele in Birkenau.[146] After Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians one of the survivors, Ludovit Feld, confirmed the number of dwarfs in Birkenau to be ten (five men, five women). Fénelon wrongly inflated that figure. "Mengele [was] surrounded by around 50 dwarfs who informed us he had removed them from the convoys being sent to the crematorium."[147] In an interview for the CBS newsmagazine _60 Minutes_, Fénelon differently places the number of dwarfs at 20.[148] Although a few other survivors also believed there were more than ten, the clear majority of witnesses corroborate that there were no more than ten dwarfs involved in Mengele's ongoing research in the camp at any one time.[149]
> It seems telling that Fénelon chose to delete this chapter from the bestselling and later English translations of her memoir.[150] Undoubtedly, the story of the dwarfs and the Ovitz family is a dramatic one, well-suited to Fania's hyperbole. But perhaps even she had second thoughts about allowing many of her outright fabrications about the dwarfs to be dispersed on a wider platform. By 1978 Fania was already beginning to contradict herself publicly in matters related to the dwarf performers and Josef Mengele.[151]
References to the dwarfs in other sourcesIn 1985, some of the dwarfs were among the plaintiffs of a trial where supposed Mengele survivors from Israel sued the West German government: [
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/07/world/jerusalem-listens-to-the-victims-of-mengele.html]
> Roughly 100 of those twins, dwarfs and others who survived Dr. Mengele's Auschwitz experiments gathered in Jerusalem over the last three days for an international hearing.
> ...
> Thirty of the twins and dwarfs testified at the Yad Vashem memorial here before a six-member board of inquiry led by Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor in the Adolf Eichmann trial, and Telford Taylor, chief American counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Many of their stories had not before been recorded.
> ...
> Some of the most gripping testimony was provided by two Rumanian Jewish dwarfs - the sisters Elizabeth Moscowitz and Perla Ovitch - who came from a circus family of seven dwarfs and three persons of normal height.
> "The minute Mengele first saw us he said, 'Now I have work for 20 years,' " Elizabeth Moscowitz recalled.
> ...
> At one point, she testified, Dr. Mengele forced their entire family to sing naked for the entertainment of the SS chief Heinrich Himmler and 2,000 Nazi soldiers and officials.
> "They prepared a small stage for us," she said. "Mengele stood on the stage with us. We were completely naked. Himmler sat in the front row with a movie camera, enjoying the performance."
The survivors ended up winning the lawsuit, but each of them only received about 13,000 USD. [
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-23-mn-10215-story.html]
In the book "In Our Hearts We Were Giants", the story was changed so that the audience didn't actually include Himmler:
> To spare them the effort of mounting the podium, prosecutor Zvi Terlow came down to the first row to conduct the inquiry. As always, Elizabeth spoke out more than her sister; both she and Perla captured the imagination of the world press. Newsweek, for example, blended some fact with much fiction in describing how the Lilliputs "entertained their tormentors. On one hellish night, the entire family was stripped naked and marched on to a stage to perform for SS chief Heinrich Himmler" - it was not him; he's confused here with a minor Nazi official who strongly resembled him - "and 2,000 Nazi officers and soldiers. Mengele acted as emcee while Himmler sat in the front row, and recorded the fun with his movie camera."
In the book, they still said that the dwarfs were made to appear naked on a stage in front of a crowd of Nazi officers, but they didn't mention how many people there were in the audience, and they didn't mention that there was someone with a movie camera in the audience:
> "Off you go," the sergeant whispered. Marching forward in a long line, they mounted the stage. To their relief they saw Mengele at the front of the stage. A solemn master of ceremonies, he waited for them to take their places in a line that stretched from one end of the stage to the other. The auditorium was packed; they had never seen so many medals and decorations. There was a murmur in the hall. The audience stared at the assortment of men, women, and children. The Lilliputs smiled in confusion, for they did not know how to begin. They looked to Mengele for a cue.
> He turned to them and snapped, "Undress!"
> Aghast, their hands trembling, they fumbled with their buttons. The Lilliputs tried to shrink into themselves, and wished they could disappear altogether. They bent their shoulders forward, they attempted to cover their genitals with their hands. "Straighten up!" barked Mengele. Standing to attention like soldiers on parade, they fixed their eyes at imaginary points at the end of the hall to avoid seeing the naked sibling or relative next to them.
By searching Google Books for "ovitz mengele", the oldest reference to the Ovitz dwarfs I found was in the book "Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land" by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. [
https://books.google.com/books?id=f6x5ZrhDR3MC&pg=PA89,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11KII22nNQNpN6Xye7v1POk62bigikFkk] The book was published in 1985, which is the same year as the trial where the Ovitz dwarfs appeared, even though the book is supposedly translated from a Polish manuscript from 1966: [
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/15/books/death-camp-memoir.html]
> In the 1960's she published a book in Poland dealing with her experiences in the Bialystok ghetto. Later she wrote ''Auschwitz.'' After the Six Day War of 1967, however, Mrs. Nomberg-Przytyk's publisher informed her that ''Auschwitz'' would not get into print unless she removed from it all references to Jews. She refused and eventually emigrated to Israel (today she lives in Canada). The manuscript was deposited by friends in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Archive in Jerusalem, where it was discovered by Eli Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch, who edited it for publication.
It's interesting that the manuscript was supposedly found in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, because the Mengele trial in 1985 was also organized by Yad Vashem. [
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292146731_The_Trial_that_Never_Happened_Josef_Mengele_and_the_Twins_of_Auschwitz_Children_of_Auschwitz_Nazi_Deadly_Lab_Experiments_Survivors]
The dwarfs were also mentioned in a book of articles from the Life magazine published in 1985. [
https://www.google.com/search?q=Ovitch+mengele+before%3A1999&hl=en&tbm=bks] The third oldest reference to the dwarfs I found on Google Books was in an issue of Der Spiegel from 1999. [
https://books.google.com/books?id=YPhLAAAAYAAJ&q=ovitz+mengele] The next two references were in a document titled "S.S. Dr. Mengele and His Seven Liliputs: Documentary Collection", Institute of Documentation in Israel, 2000, and in a German version of the same document. [
https://books.google.com/books?id=GiNoAAAAMAAJ&q=ovitz+mengele,
https://books.google.com/books?id=36mgAAAAMAAJ&q=ovitz+mengele]
good thing he couldn't lay his hands on bambi, who knows what he would have done to him!? 
