Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Students at the Ramaz high school in Manhattan are mobilizing to help Holocaust survivor Dina Babbitt regain the paintings she made in Auschwitz as a teenager.

At a special Yom Hashoah program last week at the Ramaz Upper School on 78th Street, 350 high-schoolers learned about Mrs. Babbitt’s struggle from the artist herself, thanks to the technology known as I-Chat. Mrs. Babbitt, who is 85 and no longer travels because of her health, appeared live on screen in the Ramaz auditorium, speaking from a studio near her home in northern California.

Dina, a talented young painter and cartoonist, was deported as a teenager to Auschwitz in 1943, along with her mother. Fellow prisoners asked her to paint a cheerful mural on the wall of the children’s barracks, to comfort the youngsters in their final hours. Dina’s painting of Snow White and the seven dwarves delighted the children but was discovered by the SS. Dina was hauled away to what she thought would be her execution.

The Ramaz students heard Mrs. Babbitt describe how she was instead brought to the infamous war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, who had been searching for an artist to paint portraits of some of the Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing hideous medical experiments. Mengele believed that a painter would be able to capture aspects of the Gypsies’ skin tone that he felt demonstrated their biological inferiority.

The Ramaz teens were amazed to hear that Dina – then just 19 years old – told Mengele she would agree to paint the Gypsies only if her mother were spared from the gas chambers. Mengele agreed to her demand. As a result, Dina and her mother survived the Holocaust and later settled in Los Angeles. There, Dina worked for several major cartoon animation studios, drawing characters such as Wily E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, and Cap’n Crunch.

In the 1970’s, the Auschwitz Museum, a Polish government institution on the site of the former death camp, obtained seven of Dina’s Gypsy portraits but has refused to return them to her. In 2002, the U.S. Congress unanimously urged the museum to return the paintings, but Poland has ignored the congressional resolution.

The Ramaz students are determined to help increase the pressure on the museum to give back the paintings. “We have to speak out,” said one concerned senior. “Mrs. Babbitt needs our help.”

In the days following the Yom Hashoah program, students began writing letters to museum officials in support of Mrs. Babbitt. Each spring, the Ramaz senior class visits Auschwitz and other sites in Europe. Next month, the Ramaz seniors intend to personally deliver the protest letters to the directors of the Auschwitz Museum.

The Yom Hashoah program was organized by Ms. DeeDee Benel, Ramaz’s Educational Director for Special Programs, and The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which has been spearheading the campaign for Mrs. Babbitt.

In his remarks at the event, Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff described his group’s efforts to publicize Dina’s plight, including the mobilization of 450 cartoonists and comic book artists to sign a petition appealing for return of the paintings.

One of the comic book artists involved in the petition campaign, former Batman artist Sal Amendola, was also a featured speaker at the Ramaz program. He told the students that comic book artists have rallied in support of Mrs. Babbitt both because of their natural humanitarian sympathy for her and because they themselves fought for years to persuade the comic book companies to return original artwork pages to artists.

As a young assistant in the production room at DC Comics in the early 1970’s, Amendola was instructed by his supervisors to throw out original artwork because it was taking up too much storage space. Instead, in Robin Hood fashion, he would surreptitiously return the artwork to its creators.

“Dina Babbitt is now fighting on another front in this same battle,” Amendola said. “Dina is not just fighting for those seven paintings. She is fighting for a principle that is important to every one of us: the principle that injustice is injustice, regardless of the scale; and the acceptance of any degree of injustice opens the doors to ever greater injustice.”

(Reporting by Jason Maoz and Tzivia Emmer)

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