Dina Babbitt

Annemarie Dina Gottliebová was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic), to a Jewish family. In 1939, when the Germans invaded her homeland, she was living in Prague, where she had gone to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1942, she and her mother, Johanna Gottlieb, were arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, outside Prague. The following year, they were transferred to Auschwitz.[4]

In 1944, while in Auschwitz, the 21-year-old Gottliebová was chosen by Mengele to draw portraits of Romani inmates.[5] Mengele wished to capture the Romanis' skin coloration better than he could with camera and film at that time. Gottliebová agreed, on the condition that her mother's life be spared as well.[6]

As of 2009, seven watercolors survive, all in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.[7] According to the museum's website, seven of her portraits of Romani inmates were discovered after World War II outside the Auschwitz camp in the early 1970s and sold to the museum by people who apparently did not know that Gottliebova was still alive and living in California as Dina Babbitt. The museum asked Babbitt to return to the Auschwitz site in 1973 to identify her work. After she did so, she was informed that the museum would not allow her to take her paintings home. Gottliebová-Babbitt formally requested the return of her paintings,[8] but the museum rejected her claims.[9]

The U.S. government became involved with House and Senate resolutions. The House version was authored by Representative Shelley Berkley. The Senate version was co-authored by Senator Barbara Boxer and former Senator Jesse Helms. Both became part of the Congressional Record in 2003 and passed unanimously.[10]

In collaboration with Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Neal Adams of the comic-book industry championed Babbitt's efforts.[11] Using text from Medoff, Adams illustrated a six-page graphic documentary about Babbitt that was inked by Joe Kubert and contains an introduction by Stan Lee.[12] Adams called the Babbitt situation "tragic" and "an atrocity".[11]

In 2008, Adams, the Wyman Institute and Vanguard Publications publisher J. David Spurlock spearheaded a petition campaign in which over 450 comic book creators and cartoonists urged the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum to return Babbitt's seven portraits.[13] A reprint of the graphic documentary and an account of Babbitt's plight were included in the final issue of the comic X-Men: Magneto Testament.[14]

A group of students from Palo Alto High School, led by teacher David Rapaport, worked to help Babbitt by communicating with officials from the State Department to have the paintings returned, and by writing to individuals in the government. They have written a book about this experience.[15]

In 2011, Lidia Ostałowska, a Polish writer and journalist, wrote a reportage about life of Dina Babbitt (Watercolors: A Story from Auschwitz) including the story of paintings, description of the Romani people and Sinti extermination, discussion of rights of the Romani people and Sinti to these paintings, and also the influence of the above mentioned action of American artists on the aggressive letters and emails addressed to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ca 1,500 aggressive letters a year).[16] The reportage has been translated into English in 2016 and published in the New Delhi, India.[17]

She was the second wife of animator Art Babbitt (creator of Goofy).[18] The couple had two daughters, Michele Kane and Karin Babbitt, and three grandchildren, all of whom have been active in pursuing Gottliebová-Babbitt's claims. They divorced in 1963.

Dina Gottliebová-Babbitt was diagnosed with an aggressive form of abdominal cancer and had surgery on July 23, 2008. She died one year later, on July 29, 2009, aged 86, in Felton, California.[19][20]

• Marianne Grant

• Dina Babbitt at IMDb