At the age of nineteen I became an atheist and an existentialist. It was my second year of college and I began a habit of spending hours in the library stacks pulling down volumes whose titles promised a new frontier of knowledge. That was how I discovered the holocaust. The first volume I read was the Warsaw Ghetto Diary, which thoroughly undermined my faith in the human race. I followed this harrowing narrative with the similar Vilna Ghetto Diary which further disabused me of the notion that the universe is guided by a benevolent diety. In addition to proving mankind is on its own, these personal accounts provided deep insights into the Nazi mentality and the Jewish efforts to remain unobserved. I had read the Diary of Anne Frank in high school, but by the time her sanctuary was breached her reporting was over. The angst in the ghetto diaries was palpable, and let me to seek corroboration. The histories I found with their black and white photographs of the camps was a vision of the death I was at first unequipped to deal with. Auschwitz was a particular horror, the brutal camps, the all-too-efficient crematoria. I would awaken from my nightmares in a sweat, still gasping for breath from the acrid gasses paralyzing my lungs. The existential angst seemed at its most acute in my self-tortured meanderings as I descended the steps into the antechamber where I was stripped and readied for extermination. The fascination of the camps still taunts me, and I remain to this day strongly lured by stories of unexpected or accidental holocaust survivors. Perhaps none have pulled me in more than Warwick Davis and the Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz which I recently found on YouTube. The seven members of the Ovitz family of minstrel dwarfs would have been eliminated at the entrance of the extermination camp were it not for Josef Mengele’s “medical”fascination with dwarfs, and Hitler’s infatuation with Disney’s animation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (from the German fairy-tale Sneewittchen). Warwick Davis bonds with the kindred-spirit performers of the Ovitz family and tours their origins in a remote part of Hungary, He takes us to the cattle cars and the rail platform outside the work camp where the head of the Ovitz brought out a playbill of their performances to take to the SS leaders. Warwick reminds us how the seven performers, just like himself, were world famous acts widely applauded before the war. He takes us on an intensely personal guided tour of the camp with sympathetic docents who show us the sleeping quarters for a thousand inmates impossibly crowded, and the Little Wood, a forest still standing where overflow crowds waited for space to clear out at the chambers. I thought I knew about the Holocaust, but from an empathetic man of small stature I have learned far more.
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