Stolen Legacy

Dina Gold digs deep into her history and leaves no stone unturned in her riveting account of the struggle for restitution of the property taken from her family by the Nazis. This is a meticulous and finely written account of her struggle to seek belated justice for her mother, with all the twists and turns one would expect from a fictional detective story but it is all true. -- E. Randol Schoenberg, famed attorney specializing in the recovery of Nazi looted and stolen art An exceptional adventure in Holocaust literature. Dina Gold combines investigative journalism with a keen sense of history to uncover a story everyone should read. -- Marvin Kalb, Harvard professor emeritus; now senior adviser to Pulitzer Center; former network correspondent The research for stolen assets remaining in Hitler's Germany led some survivors of famous German-Jewish families to write historic and moving works which mix, at the same time, judicial investigations and human epics - that's the case for Dina Gold's Stolen Legacy. Her property becomes in a way the reader's property and we follow with great interest and intensity her efforts to recover not only a material legacy but the entire history of her family. -- Serge Klarsfeld, lawyer; Nazi hunter Dina Gold has written a crisp, page-turning nonfiction whodunit, and proves herself to be an unyielding sleuth in the pursuit of justice for her family. At the same time, it is meticulously researched journalism that provides a fresh perspective on history. -- Nadine Epstein, editor, Moment magazine Dina Gold tells the fascinating story of the uphill attempts of one family--her own - to regain the property that had been stolen from them by the Nazis. It is an amazing story. -- Walter Laqueur, historian; political commentator; author of The Terrible Secret The Holocaustthe project of exterminating Europe's Jews--was an immense act of murder. It was also an immense act of theft. The murder was, of course, the incomparably greater crime. The dead could never be brought back to life. The ash from crematoria was dumped into rivers or spread across fields; the bodies shot into ravines decomposed in Europe's mutilated earth. Yet the stolen propertyof those who were murdered and the minority who escaped or otherwise survivedwas seized and passed on, first by the Nazis and then by the governments that followed, to new possessors, public and private. Some pretended to own that property; most knew its real origins; few were willing to part with it. This is the story of a single such property that, by indefatigable effort, was reclaimed, at least partly, two generations later. It's the story of the theft. But it's also, by inference, a small part of the story of the murder. And it's the story of a rare act of belated and incomplete, but symbolically resonant, historical justice. -- Walter Reich, Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior; former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum