Auschwitz Museum refused Holocaust survivor the pictures she was forced to paint

In 1944, Josef Mengele ordered a Jewish inmate to paint portraits of Romani people as graphic ‘evidence’ of the Nazis’ racial theory. Her family are still fighting for them. 

Visitors to Block 13 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on the site of the former death camp, are prohibited from photographing the exhibits. In addition to photographs and documents, the materials on display include four singular works of art that the museum safeguards like a precious treasure.

They are among the remnants of a series of watercolour portraits of Romani people who were incarcerated in the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.

The identity of the artist is not in dispute. She was Dina Babbitt (née Gottliebová), a Czech Jew who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States after the war. She made the paintings in 1944, when she was an inmate in Auschwitz, at the behest of Josef Mengele, the SS officer and physician who is infamous for the medical experiments he carried out on inmates at the camp.

Mengele wanted her to document the lines of the Roma faces as evidence of the Nazis’ racial theories. Where there was a dispute was over who the paintings belonged to, leading to a protracted row between Babbitt and the museum that had not been resolved at the time of her death in 2009, at age 86.

In the decades that followed Babbitt’s discovery, in 1973, that the paintings had survived the war, she made efforts to have them returned to her. The paintings belonged to her, she asserted, and were hers to do with as she pleased. She wanted to reunite with and touch them again, to redo some of them, and to decide where they would be exhibited and under what conditions.

The museum, for its part, stated that the works constituted authentic and unique testimony of the Holocaust of the Roma, and that turning them over to Babbitt could set a dangerous precedent.