World War II began and sent the world into a dark and awful period. Everyone was made aware of some of the darkest deeds humanity was capable of.
Throughout the war, many hideous things came to light and continue to haunt the surviving cultures to this day.
Nazi Germany was the center point of some ugly examples of wartime atrocities the modern world has ever seen.
Fortunately, some few managed to avoid the worst possible fate and lived to tell their tales in the following years.
One such family was the Ovitz family, notable traveling actors from Hungary who had a unique quality besides their music: their stature.
They were a family of dwarfs – people born with pseudoachondroplasia or dwarfism – who ended up in the line of Hitler’s rampage through Europe.
They were placed in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp and tended to by the nefarious Doctor Josef Mengele, who treated humans as guinea pigs.
Despite the horrors, they stayed alive long enough to tell their tale to the world years later.
10 /10 Small Life, Big Story
The Ovitz family started in the mid-1800s in Romania. Their shared descendant was a Jewish rabbi named Shimson Eizik Ovitz, a dwarf who fathered ten children across two wives.
Seven of them were dwarfs; the other three were born without disabilities.
The children of Shimson were all born between the late 1880s to the early 1920s, with the youngest being Piroska, also known as Perla, who lived until 2001.
9 /10 The Liliput Troupe
Shimson was a badchen, a sort of traditional Jewish performer. This laid the inspiration for the family to become traveling musicians throughout Europe.
They combined their unique appearance with a love of music and were called the “Liliput Troupe,” after Gulliver’s Travels’ famous race of miniature people. They performed throughout Eastern Europe and even entertained King Charles II.