Dina G. Babbitt | Artist at Auschwitz, 86

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, 86, an artist who had been forced to paint portraits of fellow prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp and later sought to recover the artworks from a museum there, died Wednesday in Northern California.

Ms. Babbitt died of cancer at her home in Felton, her daughter Michele Kane said.

Ms. Babbitt's long and unsuccessful campaign to retrieve the seven paintings of doomed Gypsy prisoners from a Polish state museum at Auschwitz became a rallying point for many other artists and Holocaust survivors.

Although the museum recently sent Ms. Babbitt reproductions in what Kane acknowledged was "a kind gesture," that was not good enough, Kane said.

From her childhood in a Jewish-Czech family to her later success as a Hollywood animator, Ms. Babbitt was a witty, upbeat woman whose personality belied some of the tragedies she endured, said Rep. Shelley Berkley, a Nevada Democrat and Babbitt family friend who worked on her cause.

A young art student when she was deported to Auschwitz, Ms. Babbitt drew a Snow White scene on a wall of children's barracks to help soothe the youngsters. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed hideous experiments on prisoners, heard of her talents and ordered her to paint portraits as mementos of his racist theories.

Ms. Babbitt said she told Mengele she would rather die if her mother was not also let out of a group of Jews to be gassed. Her mother was allowed to live. Her father and her fiance died elsewhere in the Holocaust.

After liberation, Ms. Babbitt went to Paris and became an assistant to American cartoonist Art Babbitt, one of Disney's Snow White animators.

They married and moved to Hollywood, and later divorced.

Ms. Babbitt worked in animation at various Hollywood studios. - Los Angeles Times