Eight decades after liberation from the Nazis, silence, shame and a struggling legal system keep Jewish property in Dutch family homes
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everal months ago the Dutch art detective Arthur Brand was amazed to be contacted by a man who had recently made an uncomfortable discovery about his family’s wartime past: that he was a descendant of Hendrik Seyffardt, a Waffen-SS general and one of the highest-ranking Dutch collaborators.
Not only that, said the man, but he had found out something else: a painting by the Dutch artist Toon Kelder, which had been looted by the Nazis from the famed collection of the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, was still in the possession of the Seyffardt family.
Kelder’s Portrait of a Young Girl was hanging in the hall of his relative’s house near Utrecht, he told Brand. The man told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that he felt “deep shame” about his family history, but was also “furious” about the years of silence.
