Dina Babbitt, who as a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp bartered her services as a painter for her life and her mothers life, died Wednesday in Felton, Calif. She was 86.

The cause was cancer, said her daughter Michele Kane.

Babbitt and her mother were Czechoslovakian Jews sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis in 1943. Formerly an art student, Babbitt was asked by a fellow prisoner who was overseeing a childrens barracks to paint pictures on the cheerless walls. Her paintings of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as of animal figures, eventually came to the attention of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi physician known as the Angel of Death.

Mengele was dissatisfied with photographs he had taken of Gypsy prisoners as he tried to prove them genetically inferior. Before Babbitt would agree, she said she would walk into the camps electric fence if Mengele didnt spare her mother as well.