Dina Babbitt

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. Early life and war 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.