Felton, CA - Holocaust Survivor Wants Her Paintings Removed From Auchwitz

Felton, CA - 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 prisoners. 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 cartoonists from this country and abroad sent a petition to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
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 they said, the museum notes that Babbitt wasn't the only prisoner to create artworks in Auschwitz. What if they, or their heirs, asked for them back, the museum asks - for the example of the infamous "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, was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, her family was Jewish, albeit 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."