For Some Nazi Loot, Value Is Measured on a Different Scale

Marie Hélène Sagaspe never met her father, Jean Iribarne. He died in 1945, two months after she was born and a year after he had been arrested for guiding Jews fleeing the Nazis across the French border into Spain.

Iribarne lived in Camou-Cihigue, a small village of 100 people in France that was mainly home to sheep farmers. When the Gestapo arrested him, Iribarne began a lethal journey that would take him from concentration camp to concentration camp.

For most of her life, Sagaspe, 80, knew little about her father. But several months ago, she got a call from a volunteer for the Arolsen Archives, a German organization dedicated to researching and returning items that were stolen from Holocaust victims.

The volunteer had her father’s wallet. He wanted to return it.

In March, in the local town hall of Camou-Cihigue, the director of the organization hand-delivered the leather pouch. Inside it was a picture of Sagaspe’s mother, a receipt for a package and a stamp. Sagaspe held the wallet up to her face and cried.

Marie Ange Sagaspe, her daughter, said, “For my mom, it was like meeting her father.”

Discussions about the restitution of Nazi loot often focus on high-profile art whose return is not only a matter of justice but can also be of significant financial consequence. But for descendants of those who lost property, and often their lives, in the Holocaust, missing items with little monetary value can carry vast emotional weight. Reclaiming them can feel like resurrecting family life that was lost to atrocity.

“The chair they sat on, the books they had, the candlestick they lit — that’s where we pass down the history that they tried to erase during the Holocaust,” said Agnes Peresztegi, an international lawyer who specializes in restitution cases.

In some instances, reunification results from a stranger’s good will. In others, provenance research is led by organizations or museums.

For Stephen Mautner, the restitution of family items was also a matter of surprise. He had heard stories of his grandparents Konrad and Anna but assumed that the items left behind when they fled Grundlsee, a small Austrian village, were lost or destroyed.

But in 2016 he received a message from the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna. The “Mautner collection” was in the museum’s possession. He was a direct heir, and it wanted to return the items.

The collection included the Mautners’ original sheet music, some patterns Konrad Mautner had designed for a particular type of dress popular in the Alps — “Ausseer dirndls” — and a printed collection of folk art.

“It was surprising and we were very emotional because of course, it brought up this intriguing, often painful history that my family went through at the time,” their grandson said.

Claudia Spring, a provenance researcher for the museum and a historian who is now retired, led the effort of tracing back the Mautners’ lineage. She wrote a dossier on the family after two years of research, which was presented to the Commission for Provenance Research in Austria.

“It was very, very, very clear without any doubt that this was impounded, that it is not legal in the museum and that it should be restituted,” Spring said.

But when Mautner and his cousin, the other identified heir, visited the museum to see their newfound possessions, they decided to donate the collection back to the institution.

Now included in the Mautner collection is a placard that tells the full tale — of theft, loss, learning and legacy.

“Meeting Stephen and his family was the most important thing of my work life and I’m very, very thankful for that. This is the emotional part,” Spring said. “The professional part is it’s very important to do provenance research. There’s not, ‘It’s too late, we shouldn’t do it anymore.’ This doesn’t exist for me.”

Another family, the Glattsteins, has not been as successful as yet. Members believe they have located the family’s shofar, a ram’s horn trumpet blown to welcome the Jewish High Holy Days, in the town of Edelény, Hungary, where their relatives lived before the Holocaust. It was thought to have been hidden in the attic of a family home when the Nazis sent their relatives off to concentration camps.

Sharon Glattstein Levine has told researchers for the World Jewish Restitution Organization that she believes she found the item on display in a local library during a 2014 trip to the town.

The family has yet to be able to reclaim the shofar, which it now believes is held by the family of a local historian. In May, Levine returned to Edelény and tried in a letter to enlist a town official to help, perhaps by arranging for the shofar to be transferred to the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives and then lent to the United States where the family, in particular her 97-year-old cousin Erika Jacoby, could view it.

But so far, there has been no response from the town, Jonathan Jacoby, Erika’s son, said. The library did not respond to an email from The New York Times seeking comment.

“It’s more than just an object,” Levine said in a video she made about the shofar for the restitution organization. “It’s part of my family’s history and heritage.”

Erika Jacoby remembers celebrating as a young girl the High Holy Days in Edelény with the ram’s horn. But she has not seen it since she left Hungary as a teenager, surviving imprisonment in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

“One of my biggest pains is that they stole everything,” she said.

Willi Korte, a lawyer who specializes in restitution claims, said that families who pursue returns face obstacles. Legal assistance can be expensive and without the help of a museum or professional researchers, tracking personal household items like silverware is difficult. Many items have been dispersed across borders, without proper — or any — documentation, he said.

“I’m strongly inclined that, that it is rather the exception than the rule that these items can be identified,” he said.

The archive that returned the wallet to the Sagaspe family, known decades ago as the “International Tracing Service,” focuses on possessions that were primarily confiscated from prisoners at the Dachau and Neuengamme concentration camps in Germany.

Iribarne’s wallet was in an envelope but it had no identifier, like a name, date of birth or prisoner’s number. Instead, all the leather pouch contained was the stamp, the receipt and the photo of a woman in a plastic holder. But written on the back of the photo was one clue, the town name Camou-Cihigue.

A volunteer with the archives called the village’s town hall and asked the mayor if it could send over the photo, with hopes that townspeople would be able to identify the woman. It was not terribly difficult: Sagaspe’s mother had been the mayor’s great-aunt.

Floriane Azoulay, at the time the director for the Arolsen Archives, then traveled from Germany to Camou-Cihigue to deliver the wallet to Sagaspe in person, a reunion first recounted by Le Monde.

“We’ve returned quite a bit of personal belongings in the last years, I think about 1,000,” Azoulay said. “But this is one of the stories I think that moved me the most.”

Now, Sagaspe keeps the wallet in her purse at all times. After it was returned, she and her daughter, Marie Ange Sagaspe, decided to take a trip retracing Iribarne’s path in France and Germany. They visited Compiègne, where he was first detained in France, and later Neuengamme.

Their final stop was the site of mass graves for laborers at Hannover-Stöcken, where a subcamp of Neuengamme had been located and where Iribarne died, just weeks before British troops arrived.

“Our greatest victory was bringing that wallet back to the place where it was taken from him when he was alive,” Marie Ange Sagaspe said. “We brought him back as a free man.”

Milton Esterow submitted a first draft of this article before his death in October. Michaela Towfighi completed the reporting and writing.

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