France has returned a valuable pastel drawing to a Jewish family, 56 years after the Nazis plundered their art collection during the World War II occupation of France.
Foreign Minister Herve de Charette presented Antoinette Carvailho, heir to the Levi de Benzion family, with “Les Glaneuses,” or “The Harvesters,” a drawing by French artist Leon Augustin Lhermitte that was stolen from her father’s chateau outside Paris.
Carvailho told reporters at a ceremony last week at the French Foreign Ministry that the Germans had robbed her father of some 950 works of arts, only a fraction of which she has been able to recover.
The ceremony took place amid controversy over revelations that the city of Paris owned apartments that had been seized from Jews deported to death camps or who had fled the Nazi persecution in France.
The Paris city council last month froze the sale of municipal apartments until a probe into their past ownership was completed.
Henri Bulawko, vice president of CRIF, France’s umbrella group for secular Jewish organizations, said in an interview this week that “light is being shed” throughout Europe on Jewish property stolen by the Nazis during the war.
“The Jewish community was crushed during the war, so it took a long time to pull its forces together to carry out the proper investigations that should have been done earlier,” he said.
The Lhermitte pastel, drawn in 1892, was one of 28 art works stolen from several families by a German officer stationed in France during the war.
At the end of the war, he entrusted them to a soldier of the Wehrmacht to take back to Germany for safekeeping until his return.
But the officer never returned, and the solider gave the paintings to a priest in the East German town of Magdeburg. In 1972, the priest turned them over to the Berlin State Museum.
After German reunification, France and Germany began negotiating their return.
In 1994, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl returned the works to France, where they were put on exhibit at the Musee d’Orsay to be claimed by their owners.
“I immediately recognized the drawing that had belonged to my parents,” said Carvailho, who provided French officials with an inventory of her father’s collection, which included three works by Lhermitte.
Seven other works stolen by the German officer were recovered by owners who preferred to remain anonymous.
The remaining 20, including paintings by Claude Monet, Eugene Delacroix and Camille Pisarro, have yet to be claimed.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
