The Ovitzes were Transylvanian Jews. Their father, Shimshon Isaac Ovitz, had been a scholar and Wonder-rabbi. He had a form of dwarfism called pseudoachondroplasia that leaves much of the body unaffected but causes the limbs to grow short and bowed. Rabbi Ovitz was renowned for his wisdom and compassion. Many Romanian Jews believed that, having been denied normal height by God, he was instead endowed with extraordinary and rare virtues. Amulets containing bits of parchment decorated in his finely curling Rashi script were said to have healing powers. Rabbi Ovitz had nine children of whom seven, including Elizabeth, were dwarfed. This is consistent with a diagnosis of pseudoachondroplasia, which is caused by a dominantly inherited mutation.
When Elizabeth was nine years old, her father died suddenly. His young widow, a resourceful woman, reasoned that the short stature of her children could be used to their advantage and gave them a musical education so that they could eventually form a troupe. Even as Romania and Hungary were drawn within the orbit of Nazi Germany, the Ovitz family took their ‘Jazz Band of Lilliput’ through the provincial towns of the fragmented and unstable states of Central Europe. In May 1942 Elizabeth Ovitz, now twenty-eight, met a young theatre manager named Yoshko Moskovitz. He was tall and handsome and besotted with her. He wrote to his sister that he had met a woman, small in size, but well endowed with talent, wisdom and industriousness. They married in November of the same year, but only ten days after the wedding Yoshko, a yellow Star of David on his coat sleeve, was drafted into a labour battalion. The couple would not see each other again until after the war. Concealing their Jewish identities, the Ovitzes continued to tour for another two years, but in March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary and, as the last and greatest of all pogroms rolled across the country, they were caught.
At Auschwitz, Elizabeth and her siblings were kept in a separate room so that they would not be crushed by the other five hundred inmates of the block; they were also allowed their own clothes and enough food to live on. For a while they were able to stay together as a family, and managed to persuade Mengele that they were related to another family from their village. They paid for survival by being given starring roles in Mengele’s bizarre and frenetic programme of experimental research.
As Elizabeth Ovitz would write: ‘the most frightful experiments of all [were] the gynaecological experiments. Only the married ones among us had to endure that. They tied us to the table and the systematic torture began. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples. The pain was unbearable. The doctor conducting the experiments took pity on us and asked his superiors to stop them, otherwise our lives would be in jeopardy. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments had ceased.
‘I don’t know if our physical condition influenced Mengele or if the gynaecological experiments had simply been completed. In any event, the sadistic experiments were halted, and others begun. They extracted fluid from our spinal chord and rinsed out our ears with extremely hot or cold water which made us vomit. Subsequently the hair extraction began again and when we were ready to collapse, they began painful tests on the brain, nose, mouth and hand regions. All stages of the tests were fully documented with illustrations. It may be noted, ironically, that we were among the only ones in the world whose, torture was premeditated and “scientifically” documented for the sake of future generations…’
In this, however, Elizabeth was wrong. Mengele tortured many other people as well, including a large number of twins whom he ultimately killed and dissected for the sole purpose of documenting the similarity of their internal organs. The Ovitz family walked the tightrope of Mengele’s obsessions for seven months. Once, when Mengele unexpectedly entered the compound, the youngest of the family, Shimshon, who was only eighteen months old, toddled towards him. Mengele lifted the child into his arms and softly enquired why the child had approached him. ‘He thinks you are his father.’ ‘I am not his father,’ said Mengele, ‘only his uncle.’ Yet the child was emaciated from the poor food and the incessant blood sampling.
Mengele displayed the Ovitzes to senior Nazis. He lectured on the phenomenon of dwarfism and illustrated it with the family, who stood naked and shivering on the stage. The experiments continued until October 1944. Even as the Third Reich entered its death-throes, Mengele still brimmed with maniacal purpose, producing a collection of glass eyes from which he sought a match to Elizabeth’s brown ones. As with all he did, his reason for doing so remains unfathomable.
Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945. For Elizabeth and her family the arrival of Soviet troops lifted a sentence of certain death. Nearly all of Mengele’s experimental subjects were killed once he had done with them. During the following four years the family would shuttle about the wreckage of Eastern and Central Europe. Reforming their troupe, they choreographed a grim tango that they called their Totentanz. Each night Elizabeth, partnered by one of her brothers, would dance the part of Life to his Death. In 1949 the family emigrated to Israel. Elizabeth Ovitz died in Haifa in 1992. Josef Mengele was never tried for his crimes, but died on a Brazilian beach in 1979.
THE BRAKE
Of the many grim ironies that the history of the Ovitz family presents us with, perhaps the greatest is that when Josef Mengele perceived that they were remarkable, he was right. People with disorders such as pseudoachondroplasia do tell us something important about how bones grow to the lengths that they do, and how tall we become. Mengele did not discover what this is, nor could his pointless experiments ever have told him. But half a century later it is clear that the stubby, bent and warped limbs that are the consequence of so many bone disorders speak of the phenomenon that Victor Twitty discovered: the local control of growth.
Nowhere is the dynamic nature of bone more apparent than at the ends of an infant’s long bones. Each end has a region, the growth plate, from which the bone grows. Unlike the rest of the bone, which is encased in calcium phosphate, the growth plates are soft and uncalcified. On a radiogram they appear as transverse shadows that bisect the white tips of each bone. They can be seen throughout childhood and adolescence, ever decreasing in size, until by age eighteen or so they become sealed over and linear growth stops.
Each growth plate contains hundreds of columns of chondrocytes dividing and differentiating in lock step. Born at the end of the growth plate furthest away from the bone-shaft, they then swell with proteins from which they spin a cartilaginous matrix around themselves and then die. Osteoblasts march over the graves of chondrocytes, deposit calcium phosphate and yet more matrix, and at both ends the bone pushes ever further out into space.
Pseudoachondroplasia – the disorder that afflicted the Ovitzes – throws this sequence of events into disarray. The mutation occurs in a gene that encodes one of the proteins that goes into the cartilaginous matrix that chondrocytes make. Instead of being secreted, hoewever, the mutant protein accumulates in the chondrocytes, poisoning and killing them long before their time. Not all of the chondrocytes die, but the toll is enough to drastically slow growth. The result is short, bent limbs, but a torso and face that are hardly affected at all.