[MSN] Footprints of Holocaust in a Battle for Lost Art

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Footprints of Holocaust in a Battle for Lost Art
By PETER APPLEBOME

ARMONK, N.Y.

Something wonderful happened to Martha Nierenberg in October 2000 when a trial court in Hungary said something very obvious. A fortune in artwork had been stolen from her family at the time of the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, which also ushered in one of the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust. Much of the art was hanging in plain view in the country’s two most prominent museums. It should be given back to her, the court said. The ruling was the second in her favor, and it seemed definitive.

She went to Hungary to see the magnificent paintings by El Greco, Courbet, Van Dyck and others. There were celebrations and grand plans. After decades without hope of recovering the art, after frustrating years of negotiations toward an amicable settlement after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed a reminder that justice could be slow, but when it arrived it was a blessed thing.

But, alas, it never arrived. The Hungarian government, eager to keep the art, appealed the ruling. That led to new trials and new arguments, each more legalistic and narrow than the one before.

So when she got more news last week it was not wonderful, but it was not unexpected. Another Hungarian appellate court in Budapest, ruled in favor of the government. It found that the government had acquired the art through “prescription,” the principle that by possessing the property for long enough it had gained ownership of it. It was the fifth ruling in the case. It left Mrs. Nierenberg and her allies convinced that if she were ever to find justice, it would not come through the Hungarian courts.

And it added another chapter to a dark story that reminds us that sometimes history plays out like “Schindler’s List,” and sometimes, well, Mrs. Nierenberg hopes she’s around to see how it finally plays out.

“I’m 83; I guess they’re hoping they can wait me out,” said Mrs. Nierenberg, whose family, one of the richest and most powerful in Hungary before the war, fled the Holocaust in 1944. With her husband, Ted, she went on to found the Dansk housewares company, which was later sold. “Part of me is frustrated. Part is angry at the government there. It’s been a long time, but you keep on.”

The collection dates to her grandfather Baron Mor Lipot Herzog, a banker in prewar Budapest. He assembled one of Europe’s great private collections of art and the greatest in Hungary — works by Velázquez and El Greco modern art by Renoir, Monet and other Impressionists, furniture, tapestries, sculpture, maybe 2,500 pieces at its peak.

In 1944, the Hungarian government began systematically cataloguing and seizing the valuables of Hungarian Jews. The Herzog collection was mostly hidden in the cellar of one of the family’s factories, then found and taken directly to Adolf Eichmann’s headquarters at the Majestic Hotel in Budapest for his inspection. Many pieces were shipped off to Germany with a few left in Hungarian museums. Most of the family escaped from Hungary, but the world they knew was obliterated.