Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Dina Babbitt
Summary
Annemarie Dina Babbitt (née Gottliebová; January 21, 1923 – July 29, 2009) was an artist and Holocaust survivor. A naturalized U.S. citizen, she resided in Santa Cruz, California.
As Dina Gottliebová, she was imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, where she drew portraits of Romani inmates for the infamous Josef Mengele. Following the liberation of the camp and the end of the war, she emigrated to the United States and became an animator. At the time of her death, she had been fighting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for the return of her paintings.
She was featured alongside fellow concentration camp survivors and artists Jan Komski and Felix Nussbaum in the 1999 documentary film Eyewitness, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject.
Annemarie Dina Gottliebová was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic), to a Jewish family. In 1939, when the Germans invaded her homeland, she was living in Prague, where she had gone to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1942, she and her mother, Johanna Gottlieb, were arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, outside Prague. The following year, they were transferred to Auschwitz.
In 1944, while in Auschwitz, the 21-year-old Gottliebová was chosen by Mengele to draw portraits of Romani inmates. Mengele wished to capture the Romanis' skin coloration better than he could with camera and film at that time. Gottliebová agreed, on the condition that her mother's life be spared as well.
As of 2009, seven watercolors survive, all in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. According to the museum's website, seven of her portraits of Romani inmates were discovered after World War II outside the Auschwitz camp in the early 1970s and sold to the museum by people who apparently did not know that Gottliebova was still alive and living in California as Dina Babbitt. The museum asked Babbitt to return to the Auschwitz site in 1973 to identify her work. After she did so, she was informed that the museum would not allow her to take her paintings home.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.