Look at the face of this woman. We don’t know her name, whether she had children, what language she spoke, or her nationality. We know only that she was a gipsy, and she was butchered at Auschwitz.

Joseph Mengele was busily recording the “racial characteristics” of his victims, and was disappointed because photographs didn’t catch skin tones. He found a young Czech woman called Dina Gottliebova drawing a mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the wall of the children’s quarters. She had seen the Disney film when she hid her Star of David and sneaked into the village cinema.

He offered her a deal – draw for him, and she would live. She threatened to throw herself on the electrified fence if he didn’t include her mother, so he did. Over the next three months, she painted portraits of eleven gipsies, after which they were murdered. “I painted slow” she claimed. Then she painted medical experiments, and the wives of camp officers on the side. They were moved twice more, before liberation.

She went on to art school, and marriage, her redoubtable mother still in tow. She worked in animation, drawing figures like Tweety Bird and Wile E Coyote. In the meantime, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum bought seven of the paintings from a survivor, and compared the writing in the signature with work done by Dina for a picture book about the Holocaust just after the war. Then they tracked her down. She came to Auschwitz in 1976 – to authenticate the paintings, and get them back.

“I’m thinking of the subjects like Celine and I know they would probably want me to have them,” she said.

The effort ebbed and flowed, but she campaigned to retrieve the paintings for thirty years, supported by her family, and now by US politicians. The Museum accepts she has copyright, and asks her when the material is reproduced. But they won’t hand them back.

The Polish ambassador says:

“It is the Museum’s opinion, shared by a vast majority of representatives of former inmates, Jews and Poles and international organizations, that the collection cannot and should not be partitioned. All of it belongs to the place and its victims. Mrs. Babbitt’s drawings, in the opinion of many, are not merely ‘pieces of art’ but above all an evidence of crime against humanity and should as such remain permanently in the Memorial.”

The Museum’s deputy director maintains

““we do not regard these as personal artistic creations but as documentary work done under direct orders from Dr. Mengele and carried out by the artist to ensure her survival.”

And Dina?

‘“Every single thing, including our underwear, was taken away from us,” Mrs. Babbitt said. “Everything we owned, ever. My dog, our furniture, our clothes. And now, finally, something is found that I created, that belongs to me. And they refuse to give it to me. This is why I feel the same helplessness as I did then.”

So who does a work of art belong to? The painter, the subject or the culture? Has Dina already been paid in full, with her own life, and her mother’s?

Can something like this ever be private property?

More from here, and the NYT.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 8:03 pm and is filed under history, ideas and society, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.