Art or history? Dina Babbitt survived Auschwitz by painting portraits of Gypsy prisoners for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Now 84, Babbitt wants her paintings back, but the Auschwitz Museum won't give them up.

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DINA GOTTLIEBOVA was a 19-year-old art student in Prague in 1942 when she and her mother, Johanna, were among the Jews sent to Terezin, a German concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Then, in September 1943, they were shipped to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious Nazi death camps, in Poland. There, Dina tried to cheer the imprisoned children by painting a mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Her work drew the attention of the infamous German doctor, Josef Mengele, whose inhuman medical experiments sought to prove Nazi theories of Aryan racial superiority. Along with Jews, the Roma people, or Gypsies, had been singled out by the Germans as an inferior race that should be destroyed. Frustrated that photographs did not accurately capture Gypsy skin tones, Mengele ordered Dina to paint them.

Now 84 and a U.S. citizen living in California, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt still recalls the rickety easel where she painted watercolors of the haggard faces of Gypsy prisoners. In return, she and her mother were spared the gas chamber at Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.5 million people--most of them Jews--were murdered between 1940 and 1945.

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EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE

But for Babbitt, memories of Auschwitz aren't enough. Seven of her 11 Gypsy portraits are on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and she would like to have the paintings that saved her and her mother. The museum, however, refuses to give them up.

"They are definitely my own paintings; they belong to me, my soul is in them, and without these paintings I wouldn't be alive, my children and grandchildren wouldn't be alive," Babbitt says. "I created them. Who else's could they be?"

Her three-decade effort to retrieve them drew renewed interest in 2006, when Shelley Berkley--a U.S. Representative from Nevada, where Babbitt's daughter lives--testified about the case at a congressional hearing.

The Auschwitz museum, which considers the paintings its property, argues that the watercolors are important evidence of the Nazi genocide and belong in the museum. Teresa Swiebocka, the museum's deputy director, says that "we do not regard these as personal artistic creations but as documentary work done under direct orders from Dr. Mengele and carried out by the artist to ensure her survival."

Mengele singled her out, Babbitt recalls, in March 1944, on a day when thousands of other prisoners were being taken to be exterminated. She says she demanded that Mengele also spare her mother or she would commit suicide by touching an electrified fence. She and her mother were among the 27 Czechoslovakian Jews to survive from their group of more than 5,000.

Babbitt's first subject was Celine, a Gypsy whose newborn had just died of starvation. She is shown with a scarf covering her shaved head and one ear protruding, Babbitt says, because Mengele linked the shape of Gypsy ears to inferiority. Two months later, all of the camp's Gypsies were killed. Then Babbitt was forced to paint medical procedures for Mengele.

LONG-RUNNING DISPUTE

Babbitt and her mother survived internment in two more concentration camps before liberation in May 1945.

After the war, she pursued work as an animator in Paris and was hired by the American who would become her husband, Art Babbitt. They moved to California, where Dina Babbitt returned to animation, working on characters like Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote, and Cap'n Crunch.

In 1973, the Auschwitz museum told her that the watercolors had survived. The artist flew to Poland, carrying a briefcase to take the paintings home. When museum officials refused to give them to her, the long-running dispute began.

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Various compromise ideas haven't worked. Babbitt rejected the idea that the museum lend her the art for the rest of her life; she wanted ownership and the right to hang the works in an American museum. But the Auschwitz museum is unwilling to give up even a portion of the works for fear of setting a precedent under which other survivors could claim additional artifacts on display.

"The Auschwitz museum has a lofty goal not to dismantle the museum, " Representative Berkley says. "But to Dina, this is her life. This is the life of her mother."

Displayed on an easel in Babbitt's cottage in Felton, Calif., is her attempt to create a more flattering portrait of Celine--with longer hair and without her ear protruding. But it's not the same as having the original portrait.

"Every single thing, including our underwear, was taken away from us," Babbitt says. "Everything we owned, ever. My dog, our furniture, our clothes. And now, finally, something is found that I created, that belongs to me. And they refuse to give it to me. This is why I feel the same helplessness as I did then."

Steve Friess writes for The New York Times from Las Vegas.