Imagine being herded from a boxcar and marched through a barbed-wire gate. Imagine a stern military officer with a skull and crossbones on his uniform stands at the entrance and will decide your fate with a flick of his wrist. To the left, a slave labor camp. To the right, a camp filled with potential subjects for a masochistic doctor’s horrific human experiments. Straight ahead, a huge brick building. Inside this building, cramped like sardines with others who are to share your fate, you’ll be gassed and shoveled into the mass crematorium.
Now imagine you find yourself in this hell when you’re just a teenage girl with a talent for drawing. Imagine you parlay this talent to save your mother and yourself from the big brick building. That’s the story of Dina Babbitt. A young artist forced by the Angel of Death himself, Josef Mengele, to capture the likenesses of the Romany prisoners in order to prove their genetic inferiority. It seems color photographs didn’t capture the skin tones of his subjects adequately. Dina’s paintings did.
Dina Babbitt survived Auschwitz and came to America where she worked as an animator in Hollywood. Today her paintings hang in the museum at Auschwitz. She would like to have them back. They belong to her and she should have final say on what is done with them. She earned that right. The museum doesn’t want to give them back.
Hearing of Dina’s plight, many heavyweights from the cartooning world have banded together to help Babbitt retrieve her work. Here’s the story.
If you would like to help, you can let the museum know how you feel by writing:
Mr. Piotr Cywinski, Director
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Oswiecim, Poland
muzeum@auschwitz.org.pl
Here are some sample pages from the comic book that Neal Adams and Joe Kubert put together in support of Dina Babbitt’s cause. Comic-book legend Stan Lee wrote the Foreword. I’m reproducing it here in hopes that their work will inspire others to take action by writing or E-mailing the museum and suggesting that Dina’s original art be replaced by high-quality reproductions and the original work returned to the artist. Thanks.
