Art or history? Dina Babbitt survived Auschwitz by painting portraits of Gypsy prisoners for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Now 84, Babbitt wants her paintings back, but the Auschwitz Museum won't give them up.

• Author: Friess, Steve
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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DINA GOTTLIEBOVA was a 19-year-old art student in Prague in 1942 when she and her mother, Johanna, were among the Jews sent to Terezin, a German concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Then, in September 1943, they were shipped to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious Nazi death camps, in Poland. There, Dina tried to cheer the imprisoned children by painting a mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Her work drew the attention of the infamous German doctor, Josef Mengele, whose inhuman medical experiments sought to prove Nazi theories of Aryan racial superiority. Along with Jews, the Roma people, or Gypsies, had been singled out by the Germans as an inferior race that should be destroyed. Frustrated that photographs did not accurately capture Gypsy skin tones, Mengele ordered Dina to paint them.

Now 84 and a U.S. citizen living in California, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt still recalls the rickety easel where she painted watercolors of the haggard faces of Gypsy prisoners. In return, she and her mother were spared the gas chamber at Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.5 million people--most of them Jews--were murdered between 1940 and 1945.

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EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE

But for Babbitt, memories of Auschwitz aren't enough. Seven of her 11 Gypsy portraits are on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and she would like to have the paintings that saved her and her mother. The museum, however, refuses to give them up.

"They are definitely my own paintings; they belong to me, my soul is in them, and without these paintings I wouldn't be alive, my children and grandchildren wouldn't be alive," Babbitt says. "I created them. Who else's could they be?"

Her three-decade effort to retrieve them drew renewed interest in 2006, when Shelley Berkley--a U.S. Representative from Nevada, where Babbitt's daughter lives--testified about the case at a congressional hearing.

The Auschwitz museum, which considers the paintings its property, argues that the watercolors are important evidence of the Nazi genocide and belong in the museum. Teresa Swiebocka, the museum's deputy director, says that "we do not regard these as personal artistic creations but as documentary work done under direct orders from Dr. Mengele and carried out by the artist to ensure her survival."

Mengele singled her out, Babbitt recalls, in March 1944, on a day when thousands of other prisoners were being taken to be exterminated...