Staking claim to Holocaust history

Dina Babbitt once made a deal with Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who subjected concentration-camp prisoners to horrendous medical experiments.

He needed someone to illustrate his perverse racial theories with portraits of Auschwitz’s Gypsy prisoners, an inferior group according to Nazi ideology. A trained artist, she agreed to do the work as the price of saving her mother, as well as herself, from the concentration camp’s gas chamber.

As things turned out, Babbitt, her mother and the portraits survived. She eventually settled in Northern California, while seven of her paintings wound up in a museum at Auschwitz dedicated to preserving a historical record of the Holocaust.

Ever since discovering in 1973 that they were there, Babbitt has tried to get them back. Museum officials have steadfastly stonewalled her request, once invoking the legal principle of work for hire -- the concept that the patron, not the artist, holds the rights to a commissioned work of art.

“A museum official wrote me saying that legally the only one who might have a claim on the paintings was Dr. Mengele, and he wasn’t likely to exercise it,” said Babbitt, 83. “Their position is finders keepers.”

Congress has adopted resolutions recognizing “the moral right of Dina Babbitt” to the paintings and urging diplomatic efforts to have them returned. Gallery and museum directors, including a former head of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, have petitioned on Babbitt’s behalf. Last month, 450 U.S. cartoonists and abroad sent a petition to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

After the war, Babbitt worked as an animator in Hollywood, helping bring to life cartoon characters like Daffy Duck. Earlier, the route to her survival ran through Walt Disney’s classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Mengele learned of Babbitt’s artistic skills because of a mural she did in the children’s camp at Auschwitz. To make their environment a little less harsh, she painted a mountainside scene on a barracks wall. She asked the children if there was anything they wanted her to add.

“They said: ‘Snow White,’ ” Babbitt recalled. “It was the last movie they’d seen before being taken to a concentration camp.”

Vivid memories

Babbitt lives on a mountaintop high above the Pacific Ocean. Hairpin turns wind up to her home through spectacular scenery, not unlike the bucolic landscape she once painted. A scaled-down version of that mural sits on an easel in her combination living room-studio. Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and the others seem to float in the sky -- witnessing the work’s origins in the wishes of children who perished during the Nazi era.

Babbitt is re-creating the painting for a forthcoming series of public events planned by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a Pennsylvania think tank that has taken up her cause. It coordinated the museum directors’ and cartoonists’ petition.

“We sent copies to the Polish Embassy in Washington, but neither even gave us the courtesy of a reply,” said Rafael Medoff, the Wyman Institute’s director. “It’s one last chance to do a little bit of justice for an elderly lady living in California.”

Teresa Swiebocka, curator at the Auschwitz museum, explains that the petition by Babbitt’s supporters doesn’t alter the situation. “We haven’t any reason to change our attitude of a few years ago,” she said.

In a statement on its website, the museum notes Babbitt wasn’t the only prisoner to create artworks in Auschwitz. What if they, or their heirs, asked for them back, the museum asks -- posing the example of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work will make you free”) sign that marked the camp’s entrance. It was produced by an inmate who was a master ironsmith.

Babbitt, who passed through that gate 63 years ago, still carries herself with a gentle style reflecting the refined Central European society where she was raised. She was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Her family was Jewish, although they only went to services on Yom Kippur, a day of fasting.

“There was a lady who brought to synagogue an apple with cloves in it, supposedly so the aroma would distract her from hunger,” Babbitt said. “But I think she took little bites of the apple.”

With vivid detail, Babbitt recalled life behind barbed wire. It was an experience she volunteered for.

In January 1942, her mother’s name appeared on a list of people to be transported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in northern Czechoslovakia. The Nazis didn’t deport all Jews at once, lest the machinery of the Holocaust be overburdened.

Babbitt (her maiden name was Gottliebova and she then spelled her first name Dinah) didn’t have to go. But determined to be with her mother, she insisted on signing up, much as air travelers put their names on a standby list. She made it onto the last car in the transport. Theresienstadt was a place of death -- but she found her first love there.

“He was 24, I was 19,” Babbitt said. “Karel had such spirit. Oh, I loved him so.”

Karel Klinger, who grew up on a country estate, reported for his deportation with several farm animals, explaining he didn’t know what else to do with them. Amused by the beau geste, the Nazis made him the keeper of the stables at Theresienstadt. He had a room over the stalls and improvised a skylight. When Babbitt and Klinger declared themselves betrothed, she would join him for furtive encounters.

“We would lie in bed and look at the stars,” she said, “and think of names for the babies we planned to have.”

Those dreams were put on hold in 1943, when Babbitt and her mother were transferred to Auschwitz, in southern Poland. It was a factory of death, presided over by Mengele -- the Angel of Death, as inmates dubbed him.

Babbitt’s skills -- she’d studied painting since age 6 -- fit Mengele’s needs. He had tried to illustrate the Nazis’ racial theories photographically, but frustrated by the film of the day, sent for her.

“He stuck his head out of a box camera’s cloth and asked: ‘Can you get the colors accurate?’ ” Babbitt recalled. He was pleased by her efforts. When she completed the first Gypsy portrait, he asked her to sign it.

For all the blood on his hands, there was another, almost gentle, side to his personality, Babbitt said.

“One day, Dr. Mengele came in and said: ‘My wife has had a baby,’ ” Babbitt recalled. “He’d brought me a little package of cookies.”

In January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, Babbitt and her mother were among prisoners evacuated by the Nazis. Despite the privations of that death march, the two of them survived, returning to Czechoslovakia before moving on to Paris.

A friend brought the news that Klinger had perished. “He handed me a small, ripped piece of paper on which Karel had scribbled a few words as he was dying,” Babbitt said. “On it, he had written: ‘I legally declare Dinah Gottliebova to be my wife.’ ”

Loaded with meaning

In 1973, by then married and living in California, Babbitt received a letter from the Auschwitz museum. It had acquired the Gypsy portraits, which had been preserved by some of the last inmates in the camp. Museum officials had tracked her down, thanks to the clue of that signature Mengele had insisted she put on the watercolors.

“I took a briefcase and went to Poland, thinking I’d be bringing them back,” Babbitt said. “But they said I had to leave the paintings there.”

A decade ago, Rabbi Andrew Baker tried brokering a compromise between Babbitt and the museum. Ownership of the paintings would have been shared between the parties. Baker, a staff member of the American Jewish Committee and advisory committee for the Auschwitz museum, says he can see the issue from both sides.

“You can understand their meaning to Dina but also to the museum, especially with of the rise of Holocaust deniers,” Baker said. “It’s essential to have actual artifacts of the Holocaust to preserve a memory of the horrors.”

Babbitt has memories too, and they’re emotionally bound up in those Gypsy portraits. Besides representing her talent, they are totems of a pivotal moment in her life. They witness a passage into adulthood -- a season of first love, a time when her mother began to lean on her.

Recalling all that, Babbitt said, she lies awake at night. The paintings, she thinks, could bring relief from insomnia.

“If I had them back, maybe I could sleep,” she said. “I could sleep again.”