Dinah Babbitt

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Dinah Babbitt (born January 21, 1923 in Brno as Dinah Gottliebová ; † July 29, 2009 in Felton , California ) was an American-Czech painter and sculptor .

Life

She studied painting and sculpture in Brno and Prague . In January 1942, she and her mother were first deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp . From Theresienstadt both were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 9, 1943, to the family camp. Dinah painted a scene from Walt Disney's film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of a barrack for some of the children in the camp in Auschwitz . The camp doctor Franz Lucas became aware of this work . Shortly afterwards, on February 22, 1944, she was taken to the camp doctor Josef Mengele . Mengele asked her to draw portraits of the victims of his experiments, including six Roma destined for death , in order to record their “ racial characteristics ”. He wanted to write a book with illustrations of his anthropological experiments. In return, Gottliebová and her mother were assured security for life and limb. Since Mengele demanded absolute color accuracy, a portrait took two weeks. She also painted pictures of Polish and Czech female prisoners. In addition, the camp guards came to her and asked them to take portraits of themselves or their families.

In the family camp she was the lover of prisoner functionary Willy Brachmann , who, as a camp elder, held the highest prisoner position in this section of the camp . She describes him as a decent man who helped fellow inmates.

Towards the end of the war, both survived one of the death marches from Auschwitz in mid-January 1945 . The march took her to the Ravensbrück camp , where she had to paint numbers on planes in a Dornier factory in Neustadt-Glewe .

Life after 1945

After the war Gottliebová married the American animator and inventor of the character Goofy , Art Babbitt (1907–1992), whom she followed to Hollywood . In 1962 they got divorced. In Hollywood she drew cartoons and commercial art for some of the local film studios. Until her death, Babbitt lived in Santa Cruz, California .

photos

In the 1960s the Auschwitz camp museum acquired some pictures with the signature “Dinah 1944”. It was not until 1973 that Gottliebová-Babbitt was identified as the painter of the pictures. Seven of Babbitt's portraits have since hung in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. Since then, Gottliebová has asked for the paintings to be returned. The United States Congress has also dealt with the return of the paintings.

literature

  • Sybille Goldmann, Myrah Adams Rösing: Art for Survival: Drawn from the Inside. Auschwitz. Ulm 1989
  • Christoph Heubner, Alwin Meyer, Jürgen Pieplow (Hrsg.): Signs of life: seen in Auschwitz. Bornheim-Merten 1979
  • Helen Kubica: Dr. Mengele and his calf net. Crimes in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, in: Hefte von Auschwitz, 20 (1997), pp. 369–436.
  • Sybil Milton, Janet Blatter: Art of the Holocaust. New York 1981
  • Sirena Szymanska: "Bildnerische Gigeuner" in works by inmates of the Auschwitz camp, ProMemoria, 10 (2000), pp. 57–62.
  • Kurt Holl (Ed.): The forgotten Europeans. Roma art, Roma in art. Exhibition Cologne City Museum . Verlag Rom eV, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-9803118-8-5 (pictures, their interpretation and biography of Babbitt; about her pictures from Auschwitz).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anna Hájková : Willy Brachmann from Billstedt - How a criminal became a savior of the Jews . In: Hamburger Morgenpost from June 5, 2018, pp. 16 and 25.


personal data
SURNAME Babbitt, Dinah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gottliebová, Dinah (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-Czech painter and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 2009
Place of death Felton , California