I opened the Globe this morning while I was at work and, quite randomly, I read that Dina Babbitt died a couple of days ago. I don't know if anyone else has heard of her, but she was an artist/animator who was the wife of Art Babbitt, another artist who worked on many classic Disney animated features, animating the Queen in "Snow White" and Gepetto in "Pinocchio." I first heard her story when I came across this:http://drawn.ca/2009/01/02/dina-babbitt/

Dina was a Czech-born Jew who was imprisoned at Auschwitz with her mother during WWII. While there, Dina painted a mural in the children's barracks (coincidentally of Disney's Snow White), and her talent caught the attention of Dr. Josef Mengele. 

As everyone knows, Mengele had conducted brutal and dehumanizing experiments on the prisoners at Auschwitz. He was particularly interested in research on heredity. Mengele had used color photography to attempt to document his subjects, but given the quality of the film and the processing facilities they had, he could never reproduce the color of the patient's skin tones accurately. So Mengele called on Dina to paint portraits of Gypsies and other prisoners. In return, Dina was able to bargain that she and her mother would be saved from the gas chambers.

After the war ended Dina moved to Paris where she met Art Babbitt. The two got married, moved to L.A., worked at Warner Brothers together, had kids, etc.

Years later, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum somehow acquired Dina Babbitt's paintings, and in 1973, a curator managed to trace her signature and contacted her to inquire about the provenance of the work. Since then, Babbitt had been fighting to have her paintings restored to her. For almost forty years, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has refused to relinquish ownership of the paintings, stating that artifacts proving Holocaust history should be in their original setting and that they were the property of the state.

When Dina Babbitt passed away, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum was still in possession of her paintings. 

Reading that she had passed away without having her work returned to her disgusted and saddened me. I am HORRIFIED that anyone could be so blind and insensitive. The only thing Dina Babbitt had wanted was to be able to show her grandchildren her work and say, "This is how I fought. This is why I am alive. This is why you are here." I am so angry that the museum could not distinguish the difference between a paper record and the saving grace of a human being's life.

I wish Babbitt's family the best of luck as they continue her fight to obtain her recognition of ownership.