Holocaust assets conference opens Prague

Holocaust assets conference opens Prague - Yahoo! News

Holocaust survivors, Jewish groups and experts gathered in Prague Friday to assess efforts to return property and possessions stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners or heirs.

The five-day conference, which brings together delegates from 49 countries, is the first follow-up to a 1998 meeting in Washington that led to agreements on recovering art looted by the Nazis.

According to director Helena Krejcova, some 7,000 paintings and other works of art that originally belonged to Czech Jews have been found and another more than 1,000 stolen pieces are believed to be abroad.

"There's still a lot of work ahead of us," Krejcova said, adding that sometimes efforts to restitute items are stymied by a lack of cooperation from other states and a change to that is nowhere in sight.

Case in point: Czech authorities have been waiting five years for a reply from Russia after Krejcova's team traced a valuable collection of 500 porcelain pieces once owned by Holocaust victim Hans Meyer to St. Petersburg.

 

Very nice about the stolen paintings for Holocaust victims. No offense but I wonder if they discuss other victims also? What about other people who lost everything also. Like my grandfather who's house and belongings were totally destroyed during Market Garden?
He never got any compensation (or returns of property) from anybody. Any opinions?

 

It was a battle. I don't think that there is a legal precedence for rewarding reparations to people who lost items as the result of a battle fought in their front yard. No one in the US(pearl harbor), England, or anywhere else that saw conflict was rewarded anything so why would Holland?The idea of reparations for war died a quick death in the West in light of what the role of reparations of the Versailles Treaty was seen to have played in the rise of the Nazis'.

The difference here is that the Nazi's expropriated these items either pre-war or in lulls between campaigns.It was a systematic pillaging of Jews property.What's worse is that after the war those items were never returned. Swiss banks for decades refused to surrender the bank accounts filed by ill gotton gains of Nazis'.

I can see your point, but I think the difference is that what your family lost would be chalked up to standard collateral damage whereas the Jews were purposefully targeted by the Nazis.

That sounds a bit hypocritical, but that is the dominant current point of view.

 

This is one process that will never be completely fininshed. A lot of those owners and their relatives are not around.