Thursday, October 26, 2006

Holocaust Survivor wants her paintings removed from Auschwitz

While I was in Santa Fe I read this story in the local newspaper.

Artist Dina Babbitt was once forced to make a deal with Dr. Josef Mengele (the brutal Nazi doctor who subjected concentration-camp prisoners to ghastly medical experiments). Mengele "needed someone to illustrate his perverse racial theories with portraits of Auschwitz's Gypsy prisoners, an inferior group according to Nazi ideology. A trained artist, she agreed to do the work as the price of saving her mother, as well as herself, from the concentration camp's gas chamber."

In 1973 she discovered that seven of her paintings wound up in a museum at Auschwitz dedicated to preserving a historical record of the Holocaust.

And she wants them back. Read both sides of the story here.

No comments: