pacific grove | If Dina Babbitt hadn’t been such a talented artist, neither she nor her mother would have survived Auschwitz.
Wielding her paintbrush as a talisman against evil, the young Czech Jew kept herself and her mother from the gas chambers by painting portraits of Gypsies for the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, who was studying the camp’s 13,000 Roma inmates as part of his so-called “racial research.”
Seven of the 11 portraits Babbitt completed today in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, grim reminders of the camps.
Now 82, Babbitt lives in Santa Cruz and is writing a memoir.
Born Dina Gottliebova in the former Czechoslovakia, she was studying art in Prague when her mother was ordered to report for transport to the east in January 1942. The young Babbitt volunteered for the transport to stay with her mother. The two were sent to Theresienstadt on the girl’s 19th birthday.
In September 1943, Babbitt again volunteered to join her mother when 5,000 Jews were transported out of Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. The Czech Jews were not gassed immediately. Instead, they were held in a family camp in case of future Red Cross inspection.
Babbitt’s artistic talents were soon discovered. She was asked to paint a mural for the children’s barracks. She painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — which many of the children had seen before deportation.
One day in late December, an SS officer appeared and ordered Babbitt to get in his jeep.
“I thought for absolutely sure he’s taking me to the gas chamber, or I’m going to be shot,” Babbitt recalls. Instead, he brought the young artist to a Gypsy camp.
Mengele was standing there, leaning against a tripod, peering through a camera lens at some Gypsies. He asked Babbitt whether she could paint their skin tones accurately.
Babbitt said she could try.
She was sent back to the family camp to wait. Three months later, the 4,400 survivors from her Theresienstadt transport were sent to the gas chambers. Among them were her estranged father and his new family.
Babbitt and her mother were among just 26 people handpicked from the transport to remain alive.
The next day, the summons came from Mengele: Babbitt was ordered to the Gypsy camp to begin work. At first Mengele allowed her to choose her own subjects, but after she chose two pretty young women, the Nazi doctor stepped in and began choosing elderly, less healthy-looking people.
He took painstaking interest in her work, Babbitt recalls, telling her to emphasize features that supported his racial theories.
“One evening Mengele kept me late,” she says. “He brought me a little boy, totally emaciated. He was 10 years old, but the size of a baby. The orderly holding him had to open his mouth, and the flesh around his teeth was all pus, from a starvation disease. It must have been of interest to Mengele, and he wanted me to paint him.”
Babbitt demurred, saying the orderly would have to hold the boy’s mouth open the entire time, and Mengele eventually sent the child away.
In the end all the Gypsies were gassed, including the 11 whose portraits Babbitt painted over an eight-week period. She painted slowly, fearing that once her task was completed, she and her mother might not be allowed to live.
That wasn’t the only painting Babbitt had to do. SS officers would bring her their family photos and order her to paint them.
Once she was brought a human heart that had been cut in half.
“They told me it was from a man who had been shot that morning,” she says.
Mengele even sat for Babbitt himself, ordering her to render his portrait in charcoal. “I looked into his eyes,” she says. “They were of a dead man.”
She and her mother were pulled off transport after transport and survived the camps. Babbitt says she knows it was only because of her painting talents.
In 1973 she heard that the museum at Auschwitz had her Gypsy paintings. She hurried to Poland with an empty suitcase to take her pictures home. Not surprisingly, the museum refused to part with them, both that first time and again in 1995, when Babbitt returned with an attorney and Katie Couric of “NBC’s Today Show.”
To the museum, the paintings are an indelible part of Poland’s tragic history. Even though the originals are in storage and only reproductions are on display, museum officials have told reporters that like other Holocaust memorabilia, the originals are needed to remind future generations of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis.
For Babbitt, they’re missing pieces of herself, and she says she needs them to feel whole again.
“I don’t know how to explain it to anyone who wasn’t in the camps,” she says. “It was such an unreal world, and anything I can get back of my own, it’s like a piece of me. These paintings that I did under these circumstances saved my life, and even more important, my mother’s life.”