Snow White In Auschwitz
Hey, I got this book from the library called Magneto Testament, detailing the X-Men character’s past as a Jew in Auschwitz. At the back there was a small extra section, and I looked through it..it was a comic about this girl in the concentration camps who draws a Snow White picture on the wall to entertain the children, and then when that’s discovered she is ordered by Dr Mengele to paint pictures of the people he experimented on…sometimes truly horrific things. She agrees only if her mother’s and her own lives are spared, and when the camps are liberated she and her mother are among the survivors.
And that story is true. It’s the story of Dina Babbitt. I’d never heard her story before, but I was so awestruck by her bravery. She made sure to take as long as she could painting the pictures of still-living prisoners, because while she was painting them they would stay alive.
The pictures she painted ended up in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Dina wanted them back, but they refused. She died almost exactly a year ago, still fighting for the return of the artwork that saved her.