Dina Gottliebova Babbitt dies at 86; Auschwitz survivor fought to regain portraits she painted there

Her 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 other artists and Holocaust survivors.

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, 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.

Babbitt, 86, died of cancer at her home in Felton, near Santa Cruz, her daughter Michele Kane said.

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 Babbitt reproductions in what Kane acknowledged as "a kind gesture," that was not enough, Kane said.

Babbitt "was terribly sad and upset and so despondent that she never got her pictures back. 'Heartbroken' is the right word," Kane said.

The family pledged to continue fighting for the paintings, which Babbitt said helped save her life.

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

"For her to continue this quest took not only a certain strength of character, but a very optimistic view of life, rather than a pessimistic view," Berkley said Friday.

Babbitt's wry humor was evident during a 2006 interview, when she showed the forearm scar where her concentration camp number had been tattooed. (She had it removed during an unrelated surgery.) The number, 61016, had a symmetry that she sometimes used to play the California Lottery. "It doesn't work," she quipped.

A young art student when she was deported to Auschwitz, Babbitt drew a "Snow White" scene on a wall of a 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 for his racist theories.

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

Babbitt said she wanted to briefly hold the paintings, which bear her signature, and then lend them to a museum of her choice. "I wouldn't be alive if it hadn't been for those paintings, and my kids wouldn't be here," said Babbitt, who is also survived by another daughter, Karin Babbitt, and three grandchildren.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum insists it is the rightful home of the paintings, which it says it bought from camp survivors in the 1960s and '70s. Artifacts proving Holocaust history should be in their original setting, museum officials say.

Babbitt and her mother managed to survive Auschwitz and evacuation marches. After liberation, 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. Dina Babbitt worked in animation at various Hollywood studios.

Then, out of the blue in 1973, the Auschwitz museum notified her that it had the paintings. An official had noticed that the signatures matched those on Babbitt illustrations in an unrelated book. Stunned, she began her campaign, traveling to Poland and winning a supportive U.S. congressional resolution.

Babbitt's efforts represented "an important aspect" of Holocaust survivors' struggles for restitution and to regain property stolen from them, said Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a Washington-based organization active in her cause.

Medoff and celebrated comic book artist Neal Adams helped produce a six-page cartoon version of Babbitt's life that was published this year. Adams said Babbitt symbolized the struggle of an individual against an immoral state. "Now the woman has died and she doesn't have her paintings. That's the very worst part," Adams said.

After cremation, private services for Babbitt were held Friday and plans are pending for a public memorial.

Czech pig farm on Nazi Gypsy death camp

PRAGUE, Czech Republic, May 13 (UPI) -- A Czech Cabinet minister said he will try to collect money to pay for the removal of a pig farm from the site of a Nazi camp for Gypsies in World War II.

Michael Kocab, Czech minister for minorities and human rights, Wednesday said he will urge companies to help form a foundation to provide $35 million to relocate the large pig farm at the southern Bohemian town of Lety, Prague Radio said.

In the Lety concentration camp, established by the Nazis in 1942, hundreds of Czech Gypsies, including 241 children, were killed.

Addressing a commemoration at Lety, Kocab said he would like to transform the camp site to a memorial.

In the 1970s, communist authorities of the former Czechoslovakia built the large pig farm at Lety.

The European Parliament and Czech Gypsy rights groups have been unsuccessful for years in urging Prague to relocate the farm. Czech government officials argued they were short of money, the radio said.

Jewish groups should lead condemnation of attacks on Gypsies in Europe

April 27, 2009

The Times says this front-page report by Nicholas Kulish about murderous attacks on Gypsies, or Roma people, in Hungary is the paper's second-most-emailed story. As well it should be. Attacks on Gypsies recall the Holocaust, when as many as 600,000 Roma were exterminated by the Nazis.
As Isabel Fonseca and Norman Finkelsteinhave demonstrated, the Holocaust Memorial/Elie Wiesel had trouble making room for the Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. Per Finkelstein, one memorial official said the idea was "cockamamie." (In Night, Wiesel said Roma attacked his dying father in Auschwitz.) Daniel Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust all but completely leaves out the Roma.

I have a sense Jewish official attitudes are improving (Mitchell Bard's virtual library seems to honor the Roma experience). The Holocaust Memorial states:

The fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews.

Now when the Roma are facing pogroms and terror in eastern Europe, Jewish groups should express solidarity with their fellow-victims, and be in the forefront of condemning the violence.

Posted by Philip Weiss at 03:32 PM

Roma Holocaust victims speak out

BBC News

Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January is an occasion for Jews and Roma (Gypsies) to remind the world how their families were terrorised and butchered by the Nazis in World War II.

Roma in Vlasca, a village in southeastern Romania, told the BBC's Delia Radu about their wartime ordeal.

The Roma people of Vlasca - traditional metal workers called Kalderash - are closed and inward-looking. They are reluctant to talk to anyone from outside the community.

It took weeks of negotiation to hear the accounts of Holocaust survivors in the village.

Historians often call it "the forgotten Holocaust". Up to 500,000 Roma are believed to have died in mass shootings and Nazi gas chambers.

Recent studies have brought more of their suffering to public attention, but to this day little is known about the Roma targeted for persecution and extermination by the allies of the Third Reich on the eastern front.

The men are the first to speak - and later, when it is the women's turn, they leave the room.

Dumping ground

Sandu Stanescu remembers how, in the early summer of 1942, some policemen installed a table by the road, covered it with papers and made lists: Roma families, extended families, communities - shatras .

The Nazi-backed ruler of Romania - military dictator Ion Antonescu - had just received his reward for attacking the Soviet Union: Trans-Dniester, "the land beyond the Dniester". It was a chunk of land in the east, between the rivers Dniester and Bug.

The territory, most of it part of today's Ukraine, became Nazi Romania's ethnic "dustbin" for Jews and Roma.

Conveniently the nomadic Roma had carts and horses and the police only had to escort them across the border.

But as soon as the convoys reached Trans-Dniester, the Romanian authorities confiscated everything.

"We lost our carts, horses, all our baggage and all the gold our fathers had hidden in the carts' shafts," Mr Stanescu says.

In freezing cold, with no food, thousands of Roma were marched towards the river Bug. The survivors were forced to live in camps of flimsy hovels on the outskirts of war-torn villages, or in stables on deserted collective farms, to provide forced labour.

"My father, Mihai Gheorghe, died there, my mother Maria died there, both my brothers died there," says Mihai Gogu.

"They died because of the bitter cold, because there was nothing to eat and you couldn't wash. I think filth was the main killer: lice were crawling everywhere, like teeming ants in an anthill. That was our ordeal."

Scavenging for food

One man speaks of "beatings, disease and bitterness in the fields".

Mihai Iorga recalls how his mother had "brought with her some embroidered pieces of cloth, like those ones people arrange on walls under the icons".

His sharp grey eyes are moist and he stands in the middle of the gathering to tell the story better.

"She tried to sell those in the neighbouring village, for food. But a Romanian policeman and a Ukrainian guard saw her, beat her badly and threatened to shoot her. She rushed back home crying.

"Me and my brothers begged her not to go again. But the following day off she went. She did what she did and managed to find another way to sneak back into the village.

"We waited and waited, fearing she might never come back... But lo and behold, there she was, carrying two buckets of potatoes and sweet cornflour! Oh, how we hugged her, how we kissed her! She then baked those potatoes straight on the flame because we were left with nothing, not even a pan or dish for cooking.

"Afterwards she managed to find a small tin. She melted some snow in it, there was no other source of water, and made a nice tiny polenta. It was so good! We felt so good!"

In 1944, when the war front moved west and the Romanian administration withdrew from Trans-Dniester, the Roma had to walk back hundreds of miles, "covered in mud, covered in bitterness".

A teenager at the time, Mihai Gogu was the only survivor in his family and saw many children dying on the road.

"We walked back, barefoot. Parents carried children on their shoulders. But time and again, one of these little ones would slip and fall off the grown-up's back. They died of hunger."

Mihai Iorga's father was taken ill and died during the return journey. It was his mother who managed to see her children safely to Romania.

Girls targeted

The men leave, the women enter in their flowery scarves.

During the deportation pregnant Roma women were killed because they were unable to walk fast enough.

"A heavily pregnant woman was shot before my eyes," Maria Mihai recalls. "She fell on the ground. And the baby started struggling inside her."

The women remember how their mothers had to find water and food miles away from the camps, there were long queues at the wells, sometimes the water sources had dried up. They remember their mothers making clothes out of thick brown paper potato sacks.

But most stories revolve around the constant fear of being raped by the armed guards.

"Both my parents died. I was only a girl, in the flower of my youth. That was very dangerous. They tried to take us young girls by force," says Natalia Mihai.

There were horsemen hunting women and little girls hiding under their mothers' long-layered Gypsy skirts.

"Once they put a gun at a girl's neck and raped her, something like a whole committee raped her and they were shouting and chanting," says Floarea Stanescu. But Natalia Mihai asks her to stop: "Don't remind me of all that, I feel like dying".

A report by the International Commission for the Study of the Romanian Holocaust says the number of Roma victims in Trans-Dniester is difficult to establish, mainly because the lists of deportees were negligently put together.

Some 25,000 Roma deportees are accounted for and the number of dead is thought to be 11,000. According to the report, half of the deported Roma were children and the women were frequently subjected to brutal sexual attacks.

Now that the Roma women in Vlasca have finished their stories, the men are back.

Both groups make a few final comments about the food in Trans-Dniester. "The Ukrainians used to catch those underground creatures, moles, you know", says Maria Mihai. "They skinned these animals and either ate them or sold them to us."

"Yes," says Mihai Iorga, "I ate moles too, on the banks of the Bug".

"And when we saw those moles, we wept with revulsion," continues Maria Mihai. "And we ate dogs, too… Yes, dead dogs, sweet Jesus, we were given dog meat, too."

"But in the summer, the mussels in the Bug were a luxury," says Mihai Iorga. "She knew how to cook those, my poor mum."

Most of the Holocaust survivors in Vlasca have received compensation via the International Organization for Migration, in Geneva. The IOM says survivors and their close relatives receive up to 7,000 euros (£6,590; $9,070) each.

The compensation is paid under an IOM partnership with Germany.

German memorial for Gypsy victims of Nazis

Fri Dec 19, 10:41 am ET

(AP) BERLIN – Germany has started building a memorial to about 500,000 Gypsies persecuted by the Nazis.

Construction on the square well in Berlin's central Tiergarten park follows 16 years of debate among leading groups representing Germany's Gypsies, or Sinti and Roma. It is due to be completed in 2009.

Romani Rose, leader of Germany's Central Council for Sinti and Roma, spoke at Friday's groundbreaking ceremony. Rose praised the government for "recognizing its historical responsibility for those Gypsies who were persecuted under the Nazis."

Some 220,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were killed during the Holocaust. Berlin also has memorials to Jews and gay victims killed by the Nazis.

History Claims Her Artwork, but She Wants It Back

By STEVE FRIESS NYT
Published: August 30, 2006

FELTON, Calif. — At 83, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt still recalls the rickety easel where in 1944, under orders from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, she painted watercolors of the haggard faces of Gypsy prisoners.

But her memories of the Auschwitz concentration camp, vivid though they are, aren’t enough for Mrs. Babbitt. Seven of the 11 portraits that saved Mrs. Babbitt and her mother remain not far from where she created them, on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland.

“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,” Mrs. Babbitt said with a Czech accent as she served schnitzel in her cottage here in the hills outside Santa Cruz. “I created them. Who else’s could they be?”

(MORE)

URGENT: Release Dina Babbitt's original Gypsy portraits to her now

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt (aka Dinah), is the artist who was forced to paint and draw the horrible experiments of the Auschwitz doctor known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele. Mengele also commanded her to paint the watercolor portraits of several Gypsies, who were other Auschwitz inmates, in order to capture what he called gypsy skin coloration better than he could do it with his camera and the film of that time. Once the portraits were complete, to Dina's horror, Mengele sent the Gypsies to their death.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum's website, seven of the gypsy portraits were discovered after World War II outside the Auschwitz Death Camp, from which they were removed without legal permission, in the early 1970's and sold to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum by people who apparently did not know that the artist, Dina Babbitt, was still alive and living in California. (If this information has been removed from the Museum's website, I still have the save webpage. Contact me to see it on Museum letterhead.) The Museum asked Dina to come to Auschwitz in 1973 to identify her work. However, after she did, the Museum would not allow her to take her paintings home with her. The Museum's refusal to release the paintings to Dina began her re-incarceration as a spiritual hostage of the Auschwitz Death Camp.

Much disinformation has been spread about Dina's purpose in seeking to reclaim her original artwork. The truth is that she has no desire whatever to hide the Gypsy portraits from history. As a matter of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Once she is in possession of her Gypsy portraits, she wishes to display them in Holocaust museums in the United States, in which she lives free, and around the world. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum displays only copies for security reasons.

The question has been asked "Why did Dina not take the paintings with her when she left?" The reason is that she was on a death march.

A letter was even sent to Dina once saying that if anyone had a right to the paintings it was Josef Mengele. That suggestion is nauseating. I am looking for the original letter and will post it on her website when I find it.

Dina is legally credited by the Museum as being the rightful owner of her artwork and must sign paperwork for the Museum each time it wants to reproduce her work. She has always accommodated the Museum and has never taken any monetary compensation, to which she is entitled, for the reproduction of her work. She has always asked the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to give any monies earned through the reproductions of her watercolor portraits to go to causes supporting the Gypsy or Roma people. However, to date, the Museum claims that, because it purchased the paintings from other people, the Museum does not have to return Dina's original Gypsy portraits to her. International law has now established that possessing stolen artwork does not entitle the possessor to keep it. The Museum only displays copies of Dina's paintings for security reasons and could easily represent the tragedy of the Gypsies as it does now, with copies of Dina's portraits.

Not one, but two United States Acts of Congress have been written in support of Dina. One was authored by Congresswoman Shelley Berkley. The other was co-authored by Senators Barbara Boxer and Jesse Helms. Both became part of the Congressional Record in 2003. They passed unanimously.

Dina feels that neither, she nor her Gypsy subjects, will ever have their spiritual freedom from the Auschwitz Death Camp until the portraits are returned to her so she may display them in Holocaust museums in the United States and other free countries around the world.

Our mother and we, her family, have been trying to get these paintings returned to her since 1973. Dina, who is now 85, has just been diagnosed with an aggressive form of abdominal cancer and will have surgery on Wednesday, July 23, 2008. The surgery takes six hours and is very risky under the best of circumstances.

We pray to the Museum to return Dina's artwork to her now. We further implore the Museum to not prolong this struggle for years to come after Dina passes from this earth. In addition, we welcome the understanding and support of the Roma people, Dina's friends, in securing the spiritual release of the Roma victims of Auschwitz.

We implore anyone who reads this to support the efforts to get her paintings back now by signing in to her Facebook page and sending an e-mail of support for Dina to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum through the link on that page. In addition, please forward a link to http://www.dinababbitt.com or Dina's Facebook page to every good person that you know.

Thank you for your kindness, empathy, and support.

Michele Kane and Karin Babbitt
Dina's daughters
michele@dinababbitt.com

Italy gypsies find echoes of Nazism in fingerprinting move

From THE TIMES
Richard Owen in Verona

“This is like the Shoah, the Holocaust,” says Vanda Colombo as her 11 children splash around in an inflated paddling pool in the searing heat of a Gypsy camp on the outskirts of Verona. “The Nazis exterminated Gypsies as well as Jews, and this kind of discrimination is how it started. If they come here and try to fingerprint our children we will stop them.”

With the help of the Italian Red Cross (CRI), the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi is about to start fingerprinting Roma people - including children - as part of its promised crackdown on crime.

The process could start tomorrow, although the deadline may slip after accusations of xenophobia from Unicef, the European Commission, the Catholic Church and the Italian Left.

The idea, according to Roberto Maroni, the Interior Minister and a leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, is to take a census of Italy's Roma population “so we can tell who is entitled to be here and who is not”. Those with the right to stay could then live “in decent conditions” rather than “with rats”, Mr Maroni said. The rest would be deported.

Gypsies identified in the census will receive a card giving them access to Italy's social and health services, but Roma parents who keep their children out of school and send them to beg on the streets will lose custody.

“Perhaps the Left dreams of an Italy populated by lots of Oliver Twists exploited by the Fagin of the day,” Osvaldo Napoli, a centre-right deputy, said. “But we are not in the Victorian England of Dickens, and children cannot wander abandoned through the streets of our cities.”

The criticism has been fierce. Famiglia Cristiana, Italy's most widely read Catholic magazine, condemned the scheme this week as racist and indecent. Maria Rita Verardo, head of the Association of Juvenile Court Magistrates, called it “an odious form of racial discrimination”.

Carlo Mosca, Rome's chief of police, said that he was against fingerprinting Roma children under 14, who “might be photographed instead”. Adults would only be fingerprinted if they were unable to produce a passport or residence permit, he added.

The Right blames much of Italy's street crime on the Roma, in particular on children sent out by adults to rob and steal. The fingerprinting drive, expected to last until October, will begin in Rome - where there are an estimated 9,000 Gypsies - but then widen to other cities.

There are an estimated 152,000 Roma in Italy in 700 camps - which Mr Maroni hopes to dismantle. Forty per cent have Italian citizenship but the rest are immigrants, many from Romania and the Balkans. In Verona this week eight Roma men and women of Croatian origin were arrested for allegedly using children in hundreds of robberies throughout northern Italy. Marco Odoriosio, who led the Verona police operation, said that one of the arrested women had a record of 123 detentions for theft in different towns, using 93 different aliases. The culprits were caught when their mobile phone calls to the children giving them instructions on what to steal, and where, were intercepted (a practice Mr Berlusconi, paradoxically, is trying to restrict.)

Verona, the orderly and prosperous city of Romeo and Juliet, is currently full of tourists enjoying the summer open-air opera season at the Arena, its celebrated Roman amphitheatre, and a month-long Shakespeare festival.

Out beyond the old city walls, on the baking asphalt of one of the vast car parks adjoining the football stadium, you will find a makeshift Gypsy camp, washing hanging from camper vans and shacks.

“Our children do not steal,” Mrs Colombo insists. “The older ones go out to do honest work. We are Italian Gypsies, not foreigners. We are scapegoats.”

Her husband, Marziano, sees nothing wrong with the idea of a census but bridles at the fingerprinting plan. He blames “Gypsies who have come here from the Balkans and Romania. They have given us all a bad name.” He says he used to make a living from running a sweet stall at travelling fairs, “but because of constant harassment we cannot even do that any more”.

Flavio Tosi, the Mayor of Verona and a Northern League member, agrees that “there are Gypsies who want to live a normal life, but those who live in Gypsy camps become habitual criminals and they force their children to become criminals too. Then when the children grow up they, in turn, force their children to enter a life of crime. It is a vicious circle which must be broken.”

This week it emerged that the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest appeal court, had overturned the conviction of Mr Tosi and five others for “racial discrimination” for declaring in 2001 that “the Gypsies must be ordered out because wherever they arrive there are robberies”. Mr Tosi had shown prejudice but was not guilty of stirring up racial hatred, the judges ruled.

Mr Tosi's move against Gypsy crime in Verona after he won office a year ago was a harbinger of the national swing to the Right in April, when elections brought Mr Berlusconi back to power with far-right allies on a law- and-order platform. Mr Berlusconi is accused by the Opposition of exploiting fear, and of rushing through security laws designed to save himself from corruption charges rather than deal with the causes of street crime.

“The only way to solve the Roma problem is to find them jobs, housing and education,” says Tito Brunelli, a former Verona councillor in charge of social policy and immigration, who set up a Roma camp on a disused airfield - later closed down by Mr Tosi. Mr Brunelli, a Catholic activist, says that he was dismissed for being “too tolerant” toward the Roma and trying to bring them into contact with Italians.

He suspected that Gypsies were being identified only “so that they can be expelled. Some Gypsies rob - but so do some Italians”.

Massimo Barra, the head of the Italian Red Cross, insisted that the aim was to integrate Roma people into Italian society. If children were fingerprinted, it would be done “as a game”, he said. Mr Barra said the Red Cross “always respects human rights. We are building bridges, not walls.”

Mr Maroni has said he is unfazed by the row, which had been drummed up by hypocrites. “There is no breach of European rules, or of the charter for childhood rights, no violation of any regulation” he told parliament.

Franco Frattini, the Foreign Minister, said: “We are not talking about raids against Roma, only an attempt to identify those living in our country. These things are done by many other countries in Europe without causing any scandal.” For Mrs Colombo, the census has echoes of Europe's darkest days. “When we see a uniform, we feel terror,” she said. “It's in our blood. We feel threatened.”

TRAVELLING PEOPLE

— The Roma left northwest India in the first millennium AD, spreading to most of Europe by the 16th century

— Some scholars believe that the word Gypsy, deriving from Egyptian, was adopted by the Roma people to conceal their origin and avoid persecution

— Estimates of the number of Roma killed in the Holocaust range from 220,000 to 500,000

— In 1957 the Romany language and Romany music were banned from public performance in Bulgaria

— The practice of encouraging or enforcing the sterilisation of Roma women was officially ended with the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1990

— An estimated 100,000 Roma refugees fled from Kosovo in 1999

— In Naples camps were evacuated in May after attackers set homes on fire and residents protested against the alleged kidnapping of a baby by a Roma woman

Nebraska Debut Author, Christine Harris, Publishes The Gypsy in My Soul

LINCOLN, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The dark history of WWII provides a riveting backdrop for the story of a young Gypsy woman’s fight for life.

In her debut novel, The Gypsy in My Soul, Lincoln NE’s Christine Harris brings to life the persecution of the Gypsies (now known as Roma or Romani) through the eyes of a woman desperately seeking the truth about her grandmother against the backdrop of Cold-War Eastern Europe.

“As many as half a million Roma were displaced and murdered by the Nazis and their allies during World War II,” Harris said. “I’ve tried to make the narrative real and compelling by focusing on the story of one woman’s struggle to survive and another woman’s quest to learn the truth.”

In 1943 Warsaw, Sasha Karmazin is wrenched from her family by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, Europe’s largest Nazi concentration camp. In 1984 Nebraska, her granddaughter, Beth Karmazin learns that her grandmother, presumed dead, is accused of having taken a Nazi lover and collaborated with the Nazi’s while at Auschwitz. Beth’s commitment to prove her grandmother’s innocence takes her on a three-year quest deep into Communist-controlled Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War, a journey that changes not only her life, but also the course of history.

Seamlessly moving from the turbulent 1940s to the 1980s, The Gypsy in My Soul creates a riveting portrait of one woman’s devotion to family—and to uncovering the truth.

Author Christine Harris was born in Norfolk, NE, but spent several years in Germany as the daughter of U.S. army officer and traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia during her business career as vice president of human resource for Harris Laboratories. She has received numerous professional and civic awards, as well as three gubernatorial appointments. Ms. Harris is active on community boards and committees, including Cedars Youth Services, the University of Nebraska Foundation, the Humanities Council and the State of Nebraska Nominating Commission for Juvenile Judges.

Ms. Harris has a degree in secondary education and history from the University of Nebraska and lives with her husband, Ron, in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The Gypsy in My Soul, a historical fiction novel, is published by iUniverse and is available for $17.95 at www.authorchristineharris.com or Barnes & Noble online. The Gypsy in My Soul is 274 pages. It was released in March 2008, ISBN # 0-595-47434-9.

Byelorussian gypsies lit candles to commemorate their relatives perished during World War II

Minsk, April 9, Interfax – Byelorussian gypsies commemorated their relatives perished in the years of World War II on Tuesday, the day of Romany nation, head of CIS and Baltic gypsy communities and head of the gypsy diaspora Oleg Kozlovsky told Interfax.

They lit candles and let wreaths flow in the river in their memory.

According to Koslovsky, the question of World War II genocide is still very important for Byelorussian gypsies and all gypsies of the CIS countries. “Byelorussian gypsies murdered by the fascists should be recognized the same victims as Jews or representatives of other nationalities,” the interviewee of the agency stressed.

He explained that if gypsies killed during World War II had been recognized as genocide victims, then the question of moral and material compensation to the victims and their families would have been considered from “a different angle.”

“We are collecting historical documents about gypsies suffered from Nazism, but the process of finding the documents is very complicated, as no gypsy had a passport then. Historians say that only 1% of the total pre-war gypsy population survived the war in Byelorussia,” Koslovsky noted.

According to him, about 60, 000 gypsies live in Byelorussia today, the majority of them inhabits the Gomel region. All Byelorussian gypsies are settled, they ceased migrating about 50 years ago and live mainly in the cities, and 90% of them are Orthodox.

Gypsies to sue IBM

Old article - but interesting.

23/06/2004 14:34 - (SA)

Geneva - A Swiss court has cleared the way for Gypsies to sue IBM over published allegations that the computer company's punch-card machines helped the Nazis commit mass murder more efficiently, the plaintiffs' lawyer said.

The Geneva appeals court disagreed with a lower court that refused to hear the case last year on grounds it lacked jurisdiction, the Gypsies' lawyer, Henri-Philippe Sambuc, said on Tuesday.

A Gypsy group filed the lawsuit in Geneva because IBM's wartime European headquarters was in the city. They claim the office was IBM's hub for trade with the Nazis.

"IBM's complicity through material or intellectual assistance to the criminal acts of the Nazis during World War II via its Geneva office cannot be ruled out," said the appeals court ruling. It cited "a significant body of evidence indicating that the Geneva office could have been aware that it was assisting these acts".

In its June 2003 ruling, the lower court said IBM only had an "antenna" in the Swiss city. City archives, however, show that in 1936 IBM opened an office under the name: "International Business Machines Corporation New York, European Headquarters."

No immediate reaction to the ruling was available from IBM's Geneva lawyers, who have previously referred requests for comment to the company's headquarters in Armonk, New York. Company officials there did not immediately return calls.

IBM has consistently denied it was in any way responsible for the way its machines were used in the Holocaust.

No control

The company has said its German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH, or Dehomag, was taken over by the Nazis before World War II, and it had no control over operations there or how Nazis used IBM machines.

Sambuc maintains that the company's Geneva office continued to co-ordinate Europe-wide trade with the Nazis, acting on clear instructions from world headquarters in New York.

The group represented by Sambuc - Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action - sued IBM for "moral reparation" and $20 000 each in damages on behalf of four Gypsies from Germany and France and one Polish-born Swedish Gypsy. All five plaintiffs were orphaned in the Holocaust.

The campaigners began planning the lawsuit after US author Edwin Black wrote in a 2001 book, IBM and the Holocaust, that IBM punch-card machines enabled the Nazis to make their killing operations more efficient.

Code D4 meant killed

Black said the punch-card machines were used to codify information about people sent to concentration camps. The number 12 represented a Gypsy inmate, while Jews were recorded with the number 8. The code D4 meant a prisoner had been killed.

In addition to six million Jews, the Nazis are believed to have killed at least 600 000 Gypsies, although Gypsy groups say the number could have been as high as 1.5 million.

"It does not appear inconsistent to conclude that the respondent (IBM) facilitated the task of the Nazis in their committing of crimes against humanity - acts which were counted and codified by IBM machines," the ruling said.

IBM's German division has paid into Germany's government-industry initiative to compensate people forced to work for the Nazis during the war.

In April 2001, a class action lawsuit against IBM in New York was dropped after lawyers said they feared it would slow down payments from the German Holocaust fund. German companies had sought freedom from legal actions before committing to the fund.

The Geneva case is the first Holocaust-related action against IBM in Europe, Sambuc said.

Germany Recognizes Gypsy Holocaust

Berlin, Dec 20 (Prensa Latina) The Upper House of the German Parliament (Bundesrat) Thursday agreed to demand the government build a monument to recall the extermination of the central European gypsies by the Nazi Germany.

The belated apology to the half million gypsies deported and killed in Nazi extermination camps was agreed on the occasion of the 65 anniversary of the signing of Auschwitz decree by the chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler, on December 16, 1942.

When he was leader of the Schutzstaffel, which was a major Nazi military organization exclusively under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Himmler ordered the killing of millions of people for the simple reason of being different.

It was then that 11 million people, half of them Jewish, as well as Polish, homosexuals, Jehovah witnesses and Gypsies in Germany and other occupied countries, were systematically and methodically killed.

Forgiving Elie Wiesel, Somewhat, on His Opposition to Gypsies in Holocaust Museum

Published: January 2, 2007

The New York Observer

The Nazis' extermination of Gypsies was nearly as complete, proportionally, as the Nazis' extermination of European Jews. Yet the commemoration of Gypsy victims of the Holocaust has never come even close to the memorialization of Jewish victims.
In her fine book on gypsy life, Bury Me Standing, Isabel Fonseca describes the resistance by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to the inclusion of Roma, or gypsy, victims of the Nazis in the museum that the council supervises in Washington.

It was only after the 1986 resignation of President Elie Wiesel, the survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had opposed Gypsy representation, that one Gypsy was invited onto the council...
I tended to judge Wiesel for this opposition, till a few days ago, when I read his book on his father's murder in a concentration camp, Night (1958). In it, he describes his first night in Auschwitz, after saying goodbye to his mother and one of his sisters for the last time. He and his father are moved to a barracks where Gypsy inmates assisted the German guards, or kapos. His father is suffering from colic and approaches a Gypsy to find out where the bathroom is.

The gypsy looked him up and down slowly, from head to foot. As if he wanted to convince himself that this man addressing him was really a creature of flesh and bone, a living being with a body and a belly. Then, as if he had suddenly woken up from a heavy doze, he dealt my father such a clout that he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours... I did not move... Yesterday, I should have sunk my nails into the criminal's flesh... I thought only: I shall never forgive [him] for that...
Night's great theme is the son's guilt at surviving while his father dies. It includes another scene of cruelty by Gypsies. I wish Wiesel could have gotten past his anger at Gypsies when he held a position of authority; and yet I find that I also excuse him

Hungarian extreme-right group inducts 600 new members

BUDAPEST(AFP)---A Hungarian far-right group recalling the country’s pro-Nazi regime during World War II, inducted 600 new members Sunday in a military-style ceremony amid protests from the government and Jewish groups.

Members of Magyar Garda, or Hungarian Guard, attended the event in Heroes’ Square in Budapest wearing white shirts and black uniforms emblazoned with red and white stripes, a flag associated since World War II with Hungary’s Nazi-allied Arrow Cross regime.

Some 2,000 people attended the ceremony.

Fearing a resurgence of extremism, the Socialist party in government joined Jewish and Roma (gypsy) rights groups in placing large billboards with warnings along one of the capital’s main avenues, where Magyar Garda members were to march.

The black-and-white signs, some showing Hungarian Nazi leaders during the war raising their hands in a "Heil Hitler" salute, read: "History repeats itself. You can still turn back."

The Hungarian Arrow Cross regime was responsible for the deportation of some 450,000 Hungarian Jews to Nazi death camps, mainly Auschwitz.

Magyar Garda was founded by Jobbik, a fringe far-right political party not represented in parliament, and inaugurated in August with the induction of 56 members.

Its militant anti-gay, anti-gypsy and anti-Semitic rhetoric has led Jewish and Roma rights groups to ask the government to ban Magyar Garda, although the organisation has done more mundane tasks since its establishment such as cleaning cemeteries.

Jobbik spokesman Levente Jonas told AFP: "The goal of Magyar Garda is to finish the transition from communism."

Asked how that could be done, Jonas said: "I cannot answer that question right now."

He added however that Magyar Garda leaders continued to urge members to receive weapons training, "particularly because of the rising number of crimes committed by gypsies."

Far-right groups wielding their trademark red-and-white stripes grabbed headlines in September of last year following violent confrontations with the police in Budapest.

Anti-government riots had broken out after after an audio tape was leaked on which Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany could be heard admitting he had lied to voters to win re-election.

Hundreds were injured and arrested in clashes and the police was also criticised for using excessive force.

Can the world stop genocide?

A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle, attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done.

The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United Nations officials, legal experts and academics.

The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada - the first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary.

She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by a stage light and her facial features were strong.

But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma - or Gypsy - woman who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her determination to tell her story.

"I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika Nene said through a translator.
"I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated me. I still have nightmares about it".

Many members of Marika Nene's Roma family died in the work camps and the ghettos.

She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide".

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The West has failed to prevent anti-gypsy feeling

The debate goes on in Italy after a fire that caused the deaths of four children last week. Mario Marazzati, the Sant'Egido community's spokesperson, considers that "the west has not paid its dues to the gypsy Holocaust. And yet 300,000 of them were swallowed up into the Nazi extermination camps (The very doubt concerning the exact figures goes to show the indifference of historians). The West hasn't developed the antibodies that would stop the spreading of anti-gypsy feeling. There has been no compensation, no collective guilt, no shame. ... In Italy, the life expectancy of a Romany gypsy is 45. This is not because they are burnt alive in their caravans, but because of their living standards: illness accidents, malnutrition. ... The problem doesn't lie in the number of crimes they commit, because a normal country knows how to punish the guilty. The crimes are caused by poverty and marginalisation, not by 'gypsy culture'.

Gypsy museum to open in Budapest in September

By: All Hungary News
2007-08-09 11:13:00

The Budapest Gypsy Museum about the history of the Roma (Gypsy) people in Hungary will open in the middle of September, writes fn.h.u, based on a report in daily Népszava.

Education and Culture Minister István Hiller, who helped develop the Budapest Gypsy Museum (Budapesti Cigánymúzeum), said that similar institutions are needed in other Hungarian cities as well, including Pécs and Szolnok.

Hiller also said that the Hungarian Socialist Party would like to be a partner in collecting data about the number of Hungarian Gypsy people deported during World War II.

Hundreds gather at Auschwitz to remember Gypsy Holocaust victims

Aug 02 2007, 17:20

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Several hundred people gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 2 to remember the Roma, or Gypsy, victims of the Holocaust 63 years after the last of them were gassed in the camp.

A letter from Interior Minister Janusz Kaczmarek read out to the crowd stressed the importance of remembering the suffering inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Gypsies, the PAP news agency reported.

"We must remember the Holocaust of the Roma," Kaczmarek said. "It is the concern of the Polish government that this memory not disappear, and that the next generation of residents of this republic know how tragic was the fate of our Roma citizens."

PAP said the hundreds gathered included Roma from Poland and abroad, survivors of the camp and a deputy speaker of the Polish senate, Maciej Plazynski.

The Nazis liquidated the Gypsy family camp - the so-called Zigeunerfamilienlager - at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex on August 2, 1944, sending most of the last 2,900 of them to the gas chambers, including many women, children and elderly people. Others were sent to German factories as forced laborers.

Estonia erects monument to Gypsy victims of Nazi executions

TALLINN, May 7 (RIA Novosti) - A monument to Gypsies murdered in a Nazi death camp near Tallinn during WWII has been unveiled in Estonia, local TV said.

Estonian TV said Sunday it took the country's Gypsy community six years to find a site and collect money for the monument to about 2,000 Gypsies, who were executed in Kalevi-Lijva together with 4,000 of German, Czechoslovak and Polish Jews during WWII.

Late in April, Estonian authorities removed the Bronze Soldier statue to Soviet soldiers buried in central Tallinn to a military cemetery at the city's outskirts.

The monument's relocation sparked a wave of protests, both in Moscow and Tallinn. Last week Russia expressed deep concern about a lack of response from the European Union to Tallinn's actions and was angered by the reaction of some EU countries, as well as the U.S., which said it was the Baltic state's internal affair and called for dialogue.

ROMANY HOLOCAUST: ROMANY ACTIVISTS IN CZECH REPUBLIC LOOKING FOR REDRESS

Experience gained in combating the Gypsy nuisance, and knowledge derived from race-biological research, have shown that the proper method of attacking the Gypsy problem seems to be to treat it as a matter of race. Experience shows that part-Gypsies play the greatest role in Gypsy criminality. On the other hand, it has been shown that efforts to make the Gypsies settle have been unsuccessful, especially in -the case of pure Gypsies, on account of their strong compulsion to wander. It has therefore become necessary to distinguish between pure and part-Gypsies in the final solution of the Gypsy question.---From Himmler's Circular of Dec. 8, 1938: "Combatting The Gypsy Nuisance"

Roma were the only other population besides the Jews who were targeted for extermination on racial grounds in the Final Solution. Determining the percentage or number of Roma who died in the Holocaust is not easy. Much of the Nazi documentation still remains to be analyzed, and many murders were not recorded, since they took place in the fields and forests where Roma were apprehended.

The Sinti and Roma of Germany were systematically placed into municipal camps and subjected to forced labor in 1935. Gypsy camps, or Zigeunerlager, usually located on the outskirts of cities, were guarded by the SS and were centers for sterilization and forced labor. These evolved into assembly centers for the systematic deportation to concentration camps.

Between June 12th and June 18th 1938, Gypsy Clean-Up Week took place throughout Germany which, like Kristallnacht for the Jewish people that same year, marked the beginning of the end.

By the end of the war, between 70% and 80% of the Romani population had been killed by Nazis. Yet Romani were conspicuously absent at the war crimes trials after the war.

The extermination attempts of the Roma in the Czech protectorate by the Nazis is one of the underreported features of WWII. One of the reasons given for that is that the Roma concentration camp near Pilsen was mostly staffed by Czechs. To add insult to injury there is now a pig farm on the site which the Czech government has so far failed to relocate.

The following is from Romea.cz.

Activists want to compensate more Czech Romany Holocaust victims
Prague

Ten Romany activists want to re-open the issue of compensation to Czech Romanies who were persecuted during WW2 on racial grounds and had to hide, since the state has not compensated all of them, Cenek Ruzicka, head of the Committee for Compensating the Romany Holocaust Victims, told CTK today.

The Romanies have sent their statement to Czech PM Mirek Topolanek, the chairmen of the parliamentary parties and the Government Council for Romany Issues.

Ten renowned Romany activists, who met in Karlovy Vary, west Bohemia, on Saturday, say in their statement that the government does not promote Romany integration, and that Romanies themselves want to help improve the situation of their minority.

The text was signed, among others, by Ruzicka, Karel Holomek from the Romanies' Association in Moravia, Ladislav Bily from the Board of Romany Regional Representatives and Ondrej Gina who represents Czech Romanies in the European Roma Forum.

The statement also mentions the pig farm on the premises of the wartime internment camps for Czech Romanies in Lety, south Bohemia.

According to historical documents, some 1,308 Romanies were deported to Lety during WW2, while 326 people perished there and more than 500 of its inmates ended up in the extermination camp in Oswiecim (Auschwitz).

A similar internment was also in Hodonin u Kunstatu, south Moravia, where 207 prisoners died and 800 were sent to Auschwitz. At present there is a recreational facility at the same place.

"The Romany Holocaust is unfortunately not perceived properly in society, the state and governmental institutions, and consequently concrete steps to redress the wrongs have not been taken," says the statement.

According to activists, the law enabling compensation to Romany Holocaust victims determines too strict criteria. Romanies must for instance prove that they were in hiding for at least three months during WW2, Ruzicka said, adding that the law does not reckon with the fact that a number of elderly Romanies are illiterate.

A couple of years ago some 8,000 Romanies asked for compensation for wartime sufferings, but only some 300 received it, Ruzicka recalled.

"If the proceedings were just, some 30 percent of the applicants should have been compensated," Ruzicka claims.

Romany activists have also agreed on concrete steps to improve the situation of the Romany community in the Czech Republic. They insist of Romany representatives working in a new agency to prevent the existence of Romany ghettos.

According to an analysis, there are some 300 such deprived localities with predominant Romany population where up to 80,000 people live in the Czech Republic.

According to official estimates, there are 200,000 Romanies in the 10-million Czech Republic, however Czech Romanies put the total number of Romanies in the country at about 300,000. Nevertheless during the latest census in 2001, only 11,746 inhabitants claimed to have Romany nationality.

Gypsy-haters, holocaust-deniers, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-semites: the EU's new political force

By Stephen Castle in Strasbourg
16 January 2007, © The Independent

Europe's far-right, xenophobic and extremist parties crossed a new threshold yesterday, winning more speaking time, money, and political influence in the European Parliament than ever before.

Claiming the backing of 23 million Europeans, ultra-nationalists secured enough MEPs to make a formal political grouping, underlining the growing challenge posed by the far right across the continent. For the first time since the Second World War a series of elections has swept nationalistic, far-right parties into office in municipal, regional, national and European parliament elections. The admission of Romania and Bulgaria in January of this year brought in enough far-right MEPs to form a bloc.

Mainstream politicians have been struggling for years to contain the threat from hardline nationalists and extremists who have entered coalitions or supported ruling governments in countries such as Austria, Denmark, Poland and Slovakia.

Amid formal protests and jeers in the Strasbourg Parliament, 20 MEPs yesterday signed up to the new formation called Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS). As a formal group, they are entitled to up to €1m in central funding. It is led by Bruno Gollnisch of France's National Front, who is awaiting a court verdict on charges of Holocaust denial.

Made up of ultra-nationalists the group includes one Bulgarian parliamentarian, Dimitar Stoyanov, who yesterday attacked the "Jewish establishment" and accused Roma parents of selling 12-year-olds into prostitution.

Even the ringtone of Mr Stoyanov's phone points to his hardline politics. It features a former Bulgarian national anthem which, he says, "tells of the atrocities of the Turkish army in the second Balkan war, how the rivers were flowing with blood and the widows weeping, and urges people to fight for Bulgaria".

A previous far-right grouping in the European Parliament faltered in the 1980s and rival MEPs predict that ITS will have a limited impact on the Strasbourg assembly.

Martin Schulz, leader of the socialist group which is the second-largest in the Parliament, appealed to other MEPs to unite to prevent ITS from securing senior positions in Strasbourg. He said: "We must not abandon this Parliament, which symbolises the integration of Europe, to those who deny all European values."

The new political group was established despite efforts by socialist MEPs to block its formation. One British MEP, Ashley Mote, has joined the group. A former Ukip member, Mr Mote was suspended from that party in 2004 when he faced prosecution for housing benefit fraud and has since sat as an independent.

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Auschwitz artwork, and Gypsy victims

Latimes.com
December 3, 2006
Print Edition - Opinion

Re "Art or a part of history?"
Column One, Nov. 29

Thank you for an informative and emotional article, which still haunts me. Valuable paintings of museum quality were taken from my mother's home in Krakow, Poland, at the beginning of World War II, but without proof of provenance, she has no power to claim them. It is not the worth of the art, but the principle that they belonged to her and were stolen goods, along with stolen lives and stolen futures.Dina Gottliebova Babbitt deserves to keep her paintings because they represent a part of her, of what she had to go through to survive — they are a symbol of her struggle. As an illustrator, I have found that high-quality laser prints are quite wonderful inventions. I would suggest that the Auschwitz museum invest a few zloty, make some copies for its exhibition and return the heart-wrenching but important pieces of art to their rightful owner.

MONA SHAFER EDWARDS
Los Angeles

Once again, no thoughts for the Gypsy victims. Their massacre during the Nazi Holocaust was as significant relatively as the Jewish losses and the Armenian Holocaust, and yet nobody seems to consider them victims to be remembered and memorialized. Are the Gypsies to be forgotten? Since the models and their families — who paid with their lives just because they were Gypsies after their portraits were made — are all dead, may I suggest that the true home for this art is in a museum dedicated to Gypsy victims.

GREGORY T. PARKOS
Venice

Auschwitz Prisoner Fights to Recover Her Paintings

NPR (www.npr.org)
by Robert Siegel

All Things Considered, November 30, 2006 ·

In 1944, the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele ordered Dina Gottliebova Babbitt to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners at Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death," wanted portraits of Gypsies, or Roma people, to document what the Nazis saw as their "degenerate" racial characteristics. Photographs, which he had used previously, lacked color.

Now 83, Babbitt is trying to recover seven of the original works, which are in the museum at the site of the camp.

Largest archive of Holocaust records to open

USA TODAY
By Arthur Max, The Associated Press

BAD AROLSEN, Germany — The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.

"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.

"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.

Today the Holocaust is known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the faded, onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.

The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This vast archive — 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in a German spa town — contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict need-to-know basis.

This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about to change.

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