Dina Gottliebova Babbitt

last updated 8 January 2015

1923–2009

In March 1944, Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, decided he wanted a visual record of the death camp’s Gypsies as evidence of their “racial inferiority.” So he asked a young Czech Jewish prisoner, an artist named Dina Gottliebova, to paint their portraits, in exchange for her life. Gottliebova declared she would walk into the camp’s electrified fence if her mother were not spared as well. Mengele agreed.

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Gottliebova had been a teenage art student when she was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz, said The New York Times. There, she drew Mengele’s attention after “she tried to cheer the children by painting a mural of a Swiss mountainside and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” After two months, Gottliebova had completed about 11 portraits, whereupon “all of the camp’s Gypsies were killed.” Mengele then forced her to paint gruesome medical procedures. Liberated in 1945, Gottliebova went to Paris and “interviewed for a job as an animator for Warner Bros. She married her interviewer, Art Babbitt, who, remarkably, had worked on Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

In 1973, “out of the blue,” the Auschwitz museum notified her that it had six of her paintings, said the Los Angeles Times. A “stunned” Babbitt launched a campaign to retrieve them, “winning a supportive U.S. congressional resolution.” But the museum never relinquished the works, maintaining that they were museum property. Until her death last week from cancer, Babbitt disagreed. “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,” she said. “Who else’s could they be?”