I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Lidia Ostałowska’s Watercolours: A Story from Auschwitz , but it certainly wasn’t an opening chapter about how Walt Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the reactions to it around the world. What on earth did that animated feature film have to do with Auschwitz? Quite a bit, as it turned out.
Through the prism of artist Dina Gottliebova’s time in the Auschwitz camp and later her struggle with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum to reclaim her paintings, Ostałowska’s book also sheds light on larger social and historical issues. Ostałowska admits that she never met Gottliebova, but drew from the latter’s various interviews. I have no way of knowing if this English translation by Sean Gasper Bye does justice to the Polish original but the book certainly stands on its own feet.
Gottliebova was a Czechoslovakian Jew who was first sent to the concentration camp at Thereseinstadt when she was 19 and later to Auschwitz. At the first camp, she decorated the walls of the children’s side with images from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and assorted animal figures. Officially painting propaganda signs and warning notices, Gottliebova was also accepting unofficial commissions from SS officers to paint portraits. It was this that brought her to Dr. Josef Mengele’s notice and saved her from the gas chambers. Gottliebova even managed to reprieve her mother, though her father and fiancé died.
Mengele, later dubbed Angel of Death, wanted Gottliebova’s artistic talent to document his experiments. Just around 32 when he was sent to Auschwitz, his main focus was research and experimentation. When photographs of the subjects of his experiments were not to his satisfaction, Mengele got Gottliebova to paint them. Most of these paintings were of the Romany Gypsies who were incarcerated in a special area of Auschwitz.
When the Russians captured Auschwitz, Gottliebova walked free. She assumed her paintings had been destroyed but, in 1973, found that seven had survived and were being exhibited at the museum. Though she travelled to Poland to reclaim her works, the museum authorities would not return them. Bye sums up the issue succinctly in his Translator’s Preface: “To the museum, the paintings represented historical documents. To Dina, there were works of art and her personal property.”
Apart from Gottliebova, there are many other life stories that form a part of the narrative, ranging from other camp inmates to Nazi officials. The descriptions of life in the camp and Mengele’s experiments are extremely harrowing and upsetting. Ostałowska takes the reader through the Nuremberg trials, how Auschwitz was exploited and how survivors were often neglected by other states. The latter half, while detailing Gottliebova’s fight with the museum authorities, also brings to the fore the efforts of historians from Poland, Roma activists and others to ensure that what happened at Auschwitz was not forgotten. Often when we talk of history, we tend to forget the individual at its heart. Ostałowska’s book shines light on that individual element.
To go back to the Disney link mentioned in the beginning, while living in Paris with her mother, Gottliebova was interviewed by Art Babbitt, an animator who had worked on the Snow White film. She married him and moved to Los Angeles to work for various animation studios in Hollywood.
Watercolours: A Story from Auschwitz ; Lidia Ostałowska, Zubaan, ₹495.
