Changes

|title=Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz: The Extraordinary Story of the Lilliput Troupe

|author=Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

|publisher=The Robson Press

|date=February 2013

|summary=A fabulous tale of people that made up for their lack of height with warm manners and a giant on-stage personality, before and after the Holocaust reared its ugly head.

}}

The title of this book does of course carry a sense of irony, although we never quite know exactly how much. When a man of diminutive stature was born in rural Romania in the 1860s nobody was to know what would happen to his lineage – there was no clue then that he would father ten children, and seven of them would inherit his genetic dwarfism. But history has pieced together all that followed, including the careers those children had as a performance troupe, belting out showtunes to their own accompaniment, and acting in their own tragi-comic skits. And then having the limelight stolen from them by the Nazis, and a transportation to Auschwitz. And then being surprisingly saved, and given what passed as a cushty life, fed and together, but tortured at the hands of the camp doctor, avidly researching anything he thought might shed clues on what singled out his Aryan race's genetic destiny. I say the amount of irony is unknown because we are not told exactly how short these little characters are – but he, the doctor, would have known. As one of the more ominous sentences you'll read all year has it – ''Mengele had plans for them.''