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Monday, October 25, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Auschwitz
survivor
mourns
her lost art
Polish officials refuse to return a woman's paintings of doomed fellow prisoners at her concentration camp.
By Mike Zapler
Review-Journal
As a teen-age girl in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, Dinah Gottliebova drew pictures of Snow White and the seven dwarfs on the side of prisoner living barracks, hoping to provide a bit of levity for fellow Jewish children surrounded by death and despair.
Little did Gottliebova know at the time that the drawings would ultimately keep her and her mother, Johanna, alive.
For it wasn't long before her pictures caught the attention of one of the Nazi regime's most ruthless and infamous killers, Dr. Josef Mengele. Dissatisfied with the quality of color film at the time and determined to capture for posterity the physical characteristics of non-Aryans he wished to exterminate, the so-called "Angel of Death" was looking for an artist.
Mengele and Gottliebova reached an agreement: She would draw portraits of Gypsies of his choosing, and he would keep her and her mother from the camp's gas chambers, where millions of people -- mostly Jews but also Gypsies, Poles, Soviet war prisoners and homosexuals -- were sent to their deaths.
Now, nearly 55 years later at age 76, Gottliebova is battling the Polish government to get her paintings back. Seven of her 12 World War II-era portraits remain in the Auschwitz Museum in southern Poland.
"I've got nothing else from my past," Gottliebova told some 100 Las Vegans Sunday afternoon at the Desert Willow Recreation Center in Henderson.
Gottliebova has enlisted the help of Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. The longtime Jewish activist drafted a resolution, co-sponsored by 70 House colleagues, calling on the Polish government to return the paintings.
"I kept calling the Polish ambassador but got no response," Berkley said. "What does it take to get a call back, an act of Congress? Then I thought, I can do that."
The congresswoman said House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., has agreed to hold hearings on her measure. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also has pledged his support, Gottliebova said.
Healthy and lucid, the Holocaust survivor was composed throughout her brief talk Sunday and in an interview afterward. She wore sunglasses to hide tears welling up in her eyes. Talking about her experience was more difficult than usual, she said, because so many in the audience were Jewish.
A native of Brno in the former Czechoslovakia, Gottliebova was enrolled in an arts academy at age 16 when the Germans invaded the country, rounded up her family and took them to Terezin, a Nazi holding camp. She remained there about two years before being transported to Auschwitz.
Gottliebova's artistic talents saved her life and that of her mother. Her other relatives were killed, as were the subjects of her paintings. Mengele would shoot them, Gottliebova said, as soon as she finished their portraits, causing her to take as long as possible with the artwork.
After the war, Gottliebova moved to France and met her husband, Arthur Babbitt, an animator for Warner Bros. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Hollywood, Calif., and had two daughters, Karin and Michele, before divorcing.
Gottliebova said she heard that her portraits still existed in 1973, when the Polish government contacted her in Los Angeles. She flew with her daughter to Auschwitz, expecting to recover the art.
Museum officials interviewed her at length about her wartime experience, "and then they brought me my paintings and I fell apart completely," Gottliebova said. "I thought back to 1944, when I thought I'd never be a free person again. It was a very emotional moment for me."
But the museum refused to allow her to keep the paintings. They said the Gypsy portraits were Polish property, needed to preserve World War II history.
"I was totally devastated," Gottliebova said. The Polish government maintains that same position.
Gottliebova hopes Berkley's resolution and congressional hearings will force the Polish government's hand. Should she recover the art -- which can be viewed at www.survivorart.com -- she hopes to have it displayed at museums across the world in an effort to promote awareness of the Gypsies' plight during the Holocaust.
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Printable version of this story
Dina Gottliebova prepares to speak Sunday about her battle to retrieve art she painted to stay alive in a Nazi death camp.
Photo by Craig L. Moran.
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