Ovitz family

The Ovitz family was a family of Romanian Jewish actors/traveling musicians who survived imprisonment at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Most of them were dwarfs. They were the largest family of dwarfs ever recorded and were the largest family (twelve family members from a 15-month-old baby to a 58-year-old woman) to enter Auschwitz and to survive intact.

The Ovitz family originated from Maramureş County, Romania. They were descended from Shimson Eizik Ovitz (1868–1923), a badchen entertainer, itinerant rabbi and himself a dwarf. He fathered ten children in total, seven of them dwarfs (afflicted with pseudoachondroplasia), from two marriages.

The children from his first marriage to Brana Fruchter (she was of average height), Rozika (1886–1984) and Franzika (1889–1980), were both dwarfs. Shimson's second wife Batia Bertha Husz, also average height, produced the following children: Avram (1903–1972) (dwarf), Freida (1905–1975) (dwarf), Sarah (1907–1993) (average height), Micki (1909–1972) (dwarf), Leah (1911-1987) (average height), Elizabeth (1914–1992) (dwarf), Arie (1917–1944) (average height), and Piroska (1921–2001), also known as Perla (dwarf).

The children founded their own ensemble, the Lilliput Troupe. They sang and played music using small instruments and performed all over Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and 1940s. The taller relatives helped backstage. The Ovitzes sang in Yiddish, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian and German. When they were not touring, they lived in a single house with their spouses.

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