Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
who is the fairest one of all?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
who is the fairest of them all?
One of the most famous questions in the world,
from one of the best-loved fairytales in the world.
But not so long ago it was
one of the most dangerous questions in the world.
(WOMAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
In 1930s Germany, anyone who didn't fit the Nazis' idea of perfection
was exterminated.
So what happened when they came across someone like me?
Like the Ovitzes, a family of seven Jewish dwarf entertainers.
What happened when the Nazis found them
reaches beyond the imaginings of even the darkest fairytale.
I'm going to tell you the magical story of the real seven dwarfs.
(TV) "There comes a time in every man's life
when he must go out into the world to seek fame and fortune."
"What shall I do? Go into politics?"
"Warwick Davies, Prime Minister, leader of the nation."
(GIGGLES)
How old was this? I dunno, 12?
Oh, my God! Are you serious? Oh, my God!
What's the matter with that?
This is a film about me getting the part of an Ewok.
Not many people have seen this.
"I wanna be in the movies!"
"Thank you very much."
"Please could you tell me where Ewoks have to report?"
(ALL LAUGH)
"Ewoks?" "Yeah, Ewoks."
"Ewok, it wasn't easy but we couldn't have done it without you."
"That's alright! Thanks. You worked really hard. Yep. Bye-bye."
That was 30 years ago.
I went on to do films like Willow and Harry Potter.
I even met my wife, Sam, also a dwarf,
while performing in Snow White.
"Give my love to the Ewoks!" "Sure will."
I'm perfectly comfortable with my size,
and I actually don't think I could do my job if I wasn't.
OK, there we go.
Very good.
But I've always been fascinated
by other short performers through the ages.
From court jesters to Tom Thumb.
Some were successful because they were seen as freaks,
others simply because they were great entertainers.
Extra legroom.
There's a dwarf family who really shed light on all the complexities
of being a dwarf entertainer.
The Ovitz brothers and sisters. And, wait for it,
there were seven of them.
Elizabeth, Franzika, Rozika, Micki, Avram, Freida,
and the youngest, Perla.
I've always wanted to know more about the Ovitz siblings,
so I've come to Transylvania, Northern Romania,
where their story begins.
They were born in a village that, according to an ancient fairytale,
was named after a giant who fell in love with a dwarf.
Hello. Hi, there.
They've all got, like, tools. They should be singing Heigh-Ho.
Um...
I'm not sure whether...
I don't know whether to agree. My name's Warwick.
Warwick Davis.
How did you learn about them?
I've known of them and their story for a number of years,
and it's always interested me, always something I wanted to investigate further.
You know, I'm looking at it through the eyes of a little person and also
a person who is an entertainer in the same business that they were. Yeah.
Why do you think it's important we're to know?
The idea that they didn't let their size get them down...
I met a Johnny, a local radio host who's also something of a historian.
He's agreed to show me around.
So tell me about where we are now.
We are in exactly the place the Ovitzes' house used to be
many, many years ago. Right.
And he is the one who owns the house now.
Hello, nice to meet you. I'm Warwick.
And by chance, he is the person almost,
I guess, the only one in the village who actually met the Ovitzes.
Really? Have you got a good memory of them?
(SPEAKS LOCAL DIALECT)
So I've got some pictures of the...
The Ovitzes were an unusual family.
Their father was a dwarf,
but their two mothers and three other siblings were tall,
whereas my parents and sister are all average-sized.
And when I was born, in 1970, I came as a bit of a shock.
Did you ever see them perform?
They all look like sort of classic movie stars from Hollywood, really.
I guess so. The way they were dressed.
Like this picture here, he looks like a silent movie actor. Yes.
D'you know what I mean? It reminds me of Harold Lloyd,
or a Buster Keaton sort of look.
Mm-hm.
(TRADITIONAL FOLK MUSIC PLAYS)
Above all else, the Ovitzes were committed entertainers,
and that's something I've always tried to be as well.
Being just over three feet tall, you are more vulnerable.
You tend to make up for that with a much larger-than-life personality.
That's what other dwarfs were doing all over the world in show business.
It was really the heyday of the interest in dwarfism.
The public was really fascinated by dwarfs
and they were part of freak shows.
There was 75 different agents, dwarf agents, all over Europe.
And they were really knocking on doors, hunting new dwarfs.
In Coney Island, New York,
there was a Lilliputian city where dwarfs were paid to live there.
There was the barber shop where a dwarf was the barber.
A fire brigade operated by dwarfs.
And it is estimated that, by 1939,
about 1,500 dwarfs were making their living out of show business.
(ALL SING)
They were making their living out of exhibiting their deformity.
This is what, exactly, the Ovitz family tried to avoid.
They wanted that people will come to see them
because they were able actors, or singers.
Amongst all the other dwarf acts of the era,
the Ovitz family really stood out.
They spent time practising, building props, making costumes,
so that their act was the best it could be.
They could hold an audience. It wasn't a gimmick.
From the beginning, they were thinking big.
They really appeared in the largest halls in Europe.
Places for 800, for 1,000, for a huge audience.
(TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYS)
The Ovitzes used to play a lot. Here? Yes.
Here you can see the room as it was.
So this is where we are now, this room here?
Exactly, exactly. It was the largest restaurant of the time,
and kings visited it. That's amazing.
But they weren't just entertainers cos they were small.
They were entertainers cos they were very good at what they did.
I think their reputation as great entertainers
was what carried them through a career.
That's kind of the philosophy that I have, throughout my career.
I got started in acting cos I was short, but I didn't rely on that.
I thought, to maintain this,
I need to hone the craft of performing and acting.
You know, ultimately, it'd be nice to be known as an actor
who just happens to be short, which I think the Ovitz family were.
It was the end of the 1930s and dwarfs were everywhere,
and by 1937, when Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
the craze for little people as entertainers had reached its height.
"And most entrancing of all,
Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
But no one could have foretold
who one of the films greatest fans would be.
Like all good fairytales, Disney's Snow White had a darker side.
Much like the Wicked Queen in Snow White, the Nazis' obsession
with physical perfection would prove deadly, especially for the Ovitzes.
"Mein Fuhrer! Mein Fuhrer!"
Hitler loved Disney's Snow White so much he made his own version,
as Nazi propaganda.
(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)
In the German version of Snow White, she's a beautiful Aryan maiden
who's threatened by an evil, shape-shifting outsider.
People who had any kind of physical deformity,
including dwarfs, like me, became an obsession for the Nazis.
They would either kill them through their "euthanasia" program,
or they'd use them as guinea pigs in laboratory experiments
in their quest to create a master race.
So when the Nazis started tearing through Europe,
what would that mean for the Ovitzes,
who were not only dwarfs but also Jews?
For them it was faraway Germany.
They didn't feel that it had any implication upon them,
but it was simply a terrible thing which happens elsewhere.
As if nothing changed. The show must go on.
They simply hoped the war will be somehow over
before the fire reached them.
Thanks very much, thank you.
Cheers.
This is Dragomiresti,
six miles from the Ovitzes' village, where they were forcibly taken.
I'm meeting the son of the village priest
who lived right opposite the ghetto.
Hello, I'm Warwick. Salute.
What's your name? Michai. Michai.
And this is where they were kept?
And how many people would be here? About 3,000.
Whoa! From... er... six villages.
When they were here they wouldn't have known what was going on. No. They'd have just -
They thought they were being taken to labour camps.
So if you'd tried to leave? Shooting on the spot.
Really? Uh-huh.
These pictures were taken here in this area.
This is when they would've just arrived? Yeah,
the picture was taken when they arrived.
And they had descended from the cart.
This is an unbelievable photo.
That this was taken here, we're here, there's a cart here.
It's... It's amazing.
Who's this here? A simple soldier, to compare.
It's written here that's an average height.
This is telling you that he's average size
so you could see how short they were?
Hmm.
He mocks them. He mocks them.
They consider them as "luggage".
That's the word in Hungarian.
The luggage has arrived at Dragomiresti
and they have to be thrown out of the cart.
Tsk.
I don't know what to say about that.
That's amazing.
1944, there.
Does he talk about the ghetto here in the diary anywhere?
Right.
It's kind of hard to imagine, you know, what happened here.
Um...
For the Ovitz family, suddenly they're brought here on a horse and cart.
Dumped here. It must have been so frightening.
I wonder if the children that play out here realise what their playground once was?
So finally we arrived here, as the Ovitzes did.
I mean, this place looks like it probably did in the 1940s.
Definitely, yes.
But the Ovitzes were in a cattle wagon.
I mean, that's impossible. That's impossible.
I wouldn't know even where to start, and this is meant for passengers
to get on, but a cattle truck isn't even designed with steps.
And a cattle truck is like that. There are no steps for it.
I'm not getting in there,
whatever happens. Don't try.
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS)
There were 40 cattle trucks.
Each with 80 people crammed inside.
The Ovitzes thought they were going to be re-housed,
so they'd brought the tools of their trade. Makeup, costumes, instruments.
I wonder, "What did they talk about on the train?"
Did they discuss,
"I wonder what's gonna happen?"
"Where are we going to end up working?"
Do you think they discussed a strategy?
You know, what were their thoughts.
This is a typical day,
in May '44,
where loads of transports from Greater Hungary arrive.
The Ovitz family were also from Transylvania,
which was, at the time, Greater Hungary.
So at first they arrive
and they would unload at the ramp.
As you can see, they get off the train there.
As Auschwitz was a working camp but also an extermination camp,
they needed to decide who will live and who will die.
And so the person that's deciding this? Is the doctor.
The people who live are the people who are more fit to work.
Even though it was not a rule. You could be very fit and sent to die.
So by general, I would say, women with children,
the elderly,
and people who they perceived as crippled
were automatically sent to die.
Most of them have no idea that, in 30 minutes,
they are gonna be dead.
30 to 45 minutes.
So this person here would've been...? This is a dwarf.
What's interesting, did he live or did he die? Yeah, yeah.
Basically, I would say no chance that he would live.
Even there, Micki was so self-assured,
and he had in his pocket the fan cards.
Micki there, on the ramp,
took from his coat a fan card and distributed it to the SS guard.
It's amazing.
You can see here Mengele.
He was part of the mainstream of the German academic milieu at the time.
But as you can see, he has a very striking appearance.
He was a handsome man. He was also a war hero.
He arrives at Auschwitz, where he was in the front.
So.. um... A very powerful man.
Very powerful man.
He was collecting all kinds of people who were very short or tall,
or with a pointed head,
all kinds of deformities, actually.
And all the other soldiers knew that he was collecting
for what was called "Mengele's Zoo".
The selection on them would've been,
"We're not going to exterminate you
cos I think you're gonna be of interest." Yes.
It's incredible. The Ovitzes were brought here because they were Jews,
but they managed to buy some time because they were dwarfs.
Doctors have always been interested in little people
for genuine medical reasons.
I was in and out of hospital when I was a kid
because of the medical problems that come with being a dwarf.
Wow.
But I want to understand why the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele,
was so interested in the Ovitzes.
This is Charlie Byrne, or Charles Byrne,
known as the Irish Giant in his day.
One of the tallest men who's ever lived.
Astonishing, isn't it?
I know a few tall individuals like this.
Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in Star Wars,
he's pretty tall. Nobody's perfect.
OK, I'm of a slightly different design.
You are of a slightly different design. Let's just say that.
Mengele is absolutely coming out of a tradition of comparative biology,
comparative anthropology.
Skull measuring happening in early-20th century Germany.
And it's becoming a bit more sophisticated.
Lots of interest in genetics,
so hence the interest in the Ovitz family. Mm.
I mean, it wasn't just him.
His former boss, Verschuer, a famous scientist,
a famous anthropologist,
sent him to Auschwitz, told him, said, "You're going to have
a fantastic opportunity to do experiments there.
To do things that you can't do anywhere else."
Mengele did indeed believe that somehow
the Ovitz family have the secret of growth, you know?
We could learn something from him. Mm. And d'you know something?
At heart, he was right, but the things that he did,
the experiments that he did on this family
couldn't have possibly told him anything.
They were just bizarre, irrelevant, appalling experiments.
It's a sort of a moral vacuum,
in which scientists have the opportunity
to do anything they want, no matter what the cost or the consequences.
It's the right over life and death.
Hmm. It's like that.
Children,
twins,
gypsies.
Mengele experimented on many people.
But what did he have in store for the Ovitz family?
Here we have documents
from so-called SS Hygiene Institute.
This was a big, large medical laboratory.
And there's the Ovitz name there. Yes, exactly.
What is this telling us? This is the order to do the test of the blood.
This shows us that blood was taken on 28th of June, 1944,
from this prisoner, Ovitz Perla.
And also the signature of Mengele here.
Is that his signature there?
I mean, he seems obsessed with blood tests.
I mean, it was - Mengele took the bloods day by day.
Very, very often.
He's not exactly learning a lot, is he?
You know, keep testing blood, it doesn't really tell you an awful lot.
He had a very strong impression it was very important
for the future of the Third Reich. I see.
This is where the Ovitzes slept.
The barrack was to be for 400 people,
but as the camp was overcrowded the number was doubled.
Some of the survivors are saying even about 1,000 people in each.
A thousand people in here? Yeah.
The Ovitz family, they would have slept on one of these, would they?
Probably on the bottom. Yes. I'm assuming.
The bathroom was not very safe because of the diarrhoea,
which was quite frequent. People could not control the disease.
The top was also not good because of the leaking roof.
So that was just the reality that they have to fight every single day,
for life.
We look at pictures and we read stories and account of things.
Somehow you feel remote from it,
but it's when you go to the places that you really start to realise
that, "Hang on a minute, these aren't stories, these are not tales.
This is something that happened and this is where it happened."
(CHILDREN'S LAUGHTER)
My children are dwarfs,
my wife's a dwarf,
but in another time, another place.
Around 100 dwarfs were killed in Auschwitz,
so being short wasn't gonna be enough to save the Ovitzes.
To buy more time, they'd have to use another of their assets.
One that chimed with the strange logic of Mengele
and the other officers.
The average life was about three months.
You got so used to fear.
Ja.
Anita, like the Ovitzes, is a musician,
something that appealed to the people who ran Auschwitz.
Whoever could do something that was useful to them was a commodity,
but if you couldn't, dispensable.
We arrived there in the night.
We were put in a barrack, waited.
I don't know what prompted me to, she must have asked me,
"What did you do before the war?" I said, "I play the cello."
She said, "Fantastic, there's a band here." Lucky for me, huh?
That's where I draw parallels between your story and the Ovitz family.
Exactly. Because they, indeed, were different - Anything that was a bit
out of the ordinary, you see, was suddenly interesting.
I mean, if it hadn't been Mengele with an interest in that,
I don't see how they could have survived.
In a way, I'm not surprised that the Ovitzes were using
all their skills as performers to give themselves a chance.
That's the spirit of a dwarf, of a little person.
Wearing the artistic persona helped them to distance themselves
from what was happening there.
For them it was another play - but they are actors in it.
And they're playing for their life.
The Germans could, at any time, come into our block
and ask for some music.
So you had to be ready? Ja.
And this was the moment that, for instance, Dr Mengele,
the famous guy who did the experiment on unusual people,
came into the block and wanted to hear the Traumerei by Schumann.
And I played that. It was on my repertoire, you know.
I do find it interesting that the Nazis wanted to have music,
and I'm sort of wondering why, you know,
by day they were killing people.
It was entertainment, to want music.
Was it a therapy?
In a way, in a way it must have been, must have been.
And, you know, we actually played concerts on Sunday
and, you know, people came and listened.
It was a completely ludicrous idea, really. Ja.
# SCHUMANN: Traumerei
I can't imagine it. I mean, I think I would be...
I'd be foolish to try and imagine what they went through. Um...
And even what I can imagine, I don't think I would have coped very well.
It's so, so hard to live under, under the terror,
under the fear, constantly.
The Ovitzes knew that the moment Mengele got bored of them,
they could end up here, in the little wood,
the waiting room for the gas chamber.
I've seen photographs of people in the wood
just after they arrived off the train.
Um...
The crematorias were huge.
The producer of the crematorias were saying that, per day,
they could burn 5,000 corpses.
It makes me angry, this part.
Yeah. it's really - I find it very difficult to be here.
You know, I can really feel,
not what it must have been like, but what it... what it's all about.
And, yeah, this... It's difficult being here.
The Ovitzes nightmare ended in January 1945.
Eight months after they'd arrived at Auschwitz, the camp was liberated.
Along with most of the other SS officers,
Mengele had already fled,
taking his research with him.
The dwarfs were transported away by cart,
and arrived back in their village a year later.
The fact that the Ovitzes came out alive is incredible.
They were the only family to survive the camp intact.
To have followed this story and talk to the people I have, you know,
I feel like I've got a really great insight into their lives
and... um... what made them the people they were.
It does have a happy ending.
Not for everybody, but for the Ovitzes it did.
But that wasn't without a price.
They had to live with their ordeals.
It's left me shocked and amazed,
and... and I find them even more inspirational than I did before.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
In 1949, the Ovitzes emigrated to Israel.
They started performing again to packed-out theatres,
just as they'd done before the war.
And Perla, the last of these inspirational dwarfs,
passed away in 2001 at the age of 80.
# Beat your head against the wall
# Don't ever try to figure why you seem to be to blame
# That some folks had a million
# And can't even write their name
# That's why you've got to have a little, little mahzel
# Mahzel means good luck
# Cos with a little mahzel
# You always have a buck!
# Mahzel, mahzel, mahzel... (CONTINUES SINGING IN YIDDISH)
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