Holocaust art

Thu, Nov 30, 2006

The LA Times reports on Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, an elderly artist living in the Santa Cruz mountains area. Dina is a survivor of the Holocaust, spared by the infamous Josef Mengele because of her artistic talent and forced to paint portraits of gypsies who would be murdered by the Nazis because her paints could capture skin tones more realistically than Mengele’s cameras for his twisted racial ‘experiments’ (or tortures to give them a more accurate name). She was surprised to find out many of the portraits survived and are now displayed in Auschwitz.

She has been attempting to have them returned to her for several years now; opinion, even in the Jewish community, is divided over those who believe they are her work and property and those who think they are an important part of history and belong at Auschwitz. Among those who have added their names to supporting Dina are prominent cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Kubert. “Here was a woman who actually experienced the things I only imagined might have happened to me,” remarked Joe Jubert, referring to his graphic novel Yossel, April 19, 1943, where a young Jewish lad avoids death by drawing cartoons for German troops.