Auschwitz Artist Told "Arbeit Macht Frei!"

Work will make you free—the haunting placation above the entrance of Auschwitz, the Germans' largest extermination camp outside Krakow, Poland—is taking on a sickening new light. How many of the incinerated Jews believed those words? Auschwitz survivors like Dina Babbitt might be the best ones to ask.

Babbitt and her mother were spared the gas chamber thanks to her training as an artist. Babbitt spent her days painting portraits of Auschwitz's Gypsy prisoners—a population which Nazi ideology considered inferior—for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. She traded her craft for survival. Now, in an effort to keep her paintings from her, the terrible situation she faced as a prisoner is being treated as an employment contract.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is refusing to relinquish Babbitt's paintings to the 83 year old artist—who has been requesting their return since learning of their existence more than 30 years ago, in 1973. "A museum official wrote me saying that legally the only one who might have a claim on the paintings was Dr. Mengele, and he wasn't likely to excercise it," Babbitt recently told Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune. Mengele died in February of 1979.

Work for hire is the legal principle being invoked by the museum: the concept that the patron, not the artist, holds the rights to a commissioned work of art.

Commissioned? Patron? Let's be honest here. We're talking about a "patron" who illegally imprisoned non-combatants based on race, religion, and sexual orientation, participated in their torture and extermination, violated any reasonable sense of humanity, and "commissioned" work under the threat (obvious even if unstated) of death.

A fifth grader could see the insanity in this argument.

Should the artists at Auschwitz have refused? Would they even have been permitted to refuse? Certainly these issues come into play if Babbitt's paintings are to be considered part of the historical domain, accessible only by the imprisoner and never the imprisoned.

Questions of legality aside—duress, for example, which invalidates contractual ownership—the museum's willingness to cloak the issue in the guise of public or historical service is nauseating: As if returning these works to their rightful owners would open a Pandora's box of holocaust deniers; As if history is better served by legitimizing an activity at Auschwitz in a legal sense; As if placing the rights of war criminals above those of their victims does anything other than honor the legacy of the Third Reich.

It seems to me, even considering that such items should be preserved and made available to future generations, that if an Auschwitz survivor—who created the work—wants it back, it must be given. That's just the right thing to do. And it's only a start: a beginning toward reconciliation, a way of acknowledging the individual over the state.