Auschwitz survivor Dina Babbitt is determined to get back the paintings that kept her and her mother alive when they were in the concentration camp.

Now 85 and living in Fenton, Calif., she says the paintings represent a part of her young life that often returns to her now that she is in her later years.

"They are almost like part of me. I feel like my soul is in them," she told CBC News on Tuesday.

"They took everything away from me — my underpants, my family, my grandmother, my friend Karl [a man she loved who was in the camp].

"Now they are telling me I cannot have this work that I made with my own hands."

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp has refused to return the paintings to her, saying they are the property of the camp and a valuable record of what happened to Europe's Roma under the Nazis.

They agree Babbitt, as creator of the works, owns the copyright, but say the camp itself, now a memorial site, is legal owner of the paintings.

Moves with her mother

Babbitt was a young Jewish art student going under the name Dina Gottliebova in Czechoslovakia, and living with her mother at the beginning of the Second World War. She was pressed into painting pictures of Roma, then called Gypsies, for Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous SS officer and the physician known as the Angel of Death.

When her mother was put on a transport to Theresienstadt, the young artist, then 19, volunteered to join her. And when her mother was moved again, this time to Auschwitz, she again volunteered to be moved.

"I could not leave her alone," Babbitt said.

At Auschwitz, she ran into a young man who remembered her as an artist, and asked her to paint something on the wall of the children's cabin because "we need something for the children to make it more cheerful," she recalled.

'When you paint a portrait, you don't paint just the outside. You go into that person.'—Dina Babbitt, Auschwitz survivor, artist

"I started painting. I painted some mountains with trees and flowers, and then I made a railing as if the children would be standing on a balcony looking at the Swiss countryside," she said. The children gathered around to watch her and asked for an addition to the picture — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the last movie most of them had seen.

Saved from the line

Babbitt said she was frightened she would be punished over the painting, but instead, it brought her to the attention of Mengele.

One day she was taken to the separate camp that housed Roma, and was met by an SS man who was taking photographs of the camp inmates.

"He asked me, 'Can you do portraits?' I said 'yes.' He asked, 'Can you get the colours more accurate — the camera doesn't get the colours. It's too garish.' It was Technicolour. I said, 'I can try.'"

She learned later that the man she had spoken to was Mengele. He singled her out of a line headed for the gas chambers months later because of her drawing talent, also agreeing to let her mother live.

She was summoned to Mengele's office in the Gypsy camp and set up with two chairs — one for a drawing tablet and paints, and another chair for the subject.

"Dr. Mengele told me to go outside and pick somebody to paint. I came to a group of young girls and I picked a very pretty one with a red scarf," she recalled.

That painting was quite badly done, she said, but she picked another subject, a young woman who had recently lost her baby.

"I picked Celine, a young woman I became friends with. We used to sing songs when Mengele wasn't there," Babbitt said. "She was very sad. She couldn't hold any food down and there were dark circles under her eyes. I painted her the way she felt to me."

It was that connection, to those victims of the camps, that Babbit remembers now. It's one of the reasons she wants the paintings back.

"When you paint a portrait, you don't paint just the outside. You go into that person, you have a relationship with that person," she said. "I don't know [images of] these people should be in Auschwitz."

At one point she painted Mengele himself, a black-and-white pencil drawing that also survives, along with seven paintings of Roma.

She said she didn't know the fates of the people she painted, though she supposes most of them are dead.

Mengele's interest seemed to be for her to capture the difference in appearance between the people she painted and the Aryan race.

"I thought it was supposed to be illustrations for a book he was writing," Babbitt said. "He would always come and show me the differences between Gypsies' hairlines, eyes, ears — and Aryan ones — just making sure that I understood. I knew this was what he wanted me to emphasize."

Babbitt didn't see the paintings again until 1973, when a letter from the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial let her know where they were.

Runs across own paintings

By then, she had married and later divorced Art Babbitt, a Disney animator she met in Paris after the war who had created the images of Snow White and the seven dwarfs she had recreated on the children's cabin.

She was living in California and working again as an artist and animator, but she flew to Poland to see the works, which turned out to be her own.

"They brought paintings and I held them in my hand. I broke down a little bit. I thanked them for preserving them," Babbitt said. She asked for the paintings then and there, but was told by the director that she could not have them.

Babbitt began inquiries in the 1980s in an effort to reclaim them, and said the works now on the walls of Auschwitz-Birkenau are reproductions of her own works. She doesn't know the location of the original paintings.

"To this day, I would like nothing more than to hold them in my hands," she said. "I don't have much time any more. I'm 85 and unless it is resolved soon, it will be too late for me."