Perspectives: Warwick Davis – The Seven Dwarves of Auschwitz. STV 10pm

Warwick Davis is a dwarf, so he was just the man to tell us about the Ovitzes, a Jewish family that ended up in Mengele’s zoo inside Auschwitz. As Mengele told one of the Ovitzes’s women, ‘they were lucky, because otherwise they could have ended up over there.’ Over there was a crematorium capacity of 5000 bodies a day. At one point Warwick is shown on the train tracks and a camera swoops along like a train and flies over his head into the barracks of the camp. Warwick says something like: ‘I don’t know how they done it. I just couldn’t have coped.’ I think he’s missing the point. The Ovitzes didn’t waken up one morning and go I’m fucking sick of touring Czechoslovakia and their birthplace (Greater) Hungary. Let’s all jump on a train to Auschwitz. I’d refer him to Mengele’s statement above. They were doubly unlucky. They were dwarves, which alone would have meant eugenic killing and they were Jews. One doesn’t cancel out the other and the Germans were very efficient so they wouldn’t have killed them twice. But they were also lucky because they could speak German. They were lucky they got into Mengele’s zoo. They were lucky they could entertain the Nazis. But there biggest piece of luck was the war was ending. Anyone that lasted three months in Auschwitz was a veteran. They lasted eight months and were liberated by the Russians. I don’t know how they coped with not growing up to be an American and going to live with Warwick Davis.