Suzanne Loe­bl grew up in Nazi Ger­many in a Jew­ish art-col­lect­ing fam­i­ly. Now, decades lat­er, she has writ­ten with ten­der mem­o­ries about the works of art that were loot­ed. As a Holo­caust sur­vivor, Loebl’s writ­ing dis­plays a deep degree of sen­si­tiv­i­ty and lev­el of poignan­cy. Read­ers are swept along as the author shares what hap­pened, paint­ing by paint­ing, start­ing with the theft and then look­ing at a great many of the pieces that were recov­ered and restored to their right­ful owners.

Through­out, Loe­bl describes the Nazi attack on mod­ern art as a ver­i­ta­ble cru­sade against the so-called degen­er­a­cy of both the works them­selves and the artists who pro­duced them. Loe­bl is dili­gent in describ­ing the stolen pieces, list­ing in an appen­dix exact­ly where they are cur­rent­ly on dis­play in US muse­ums. This wel­come addi­tion not only enables us to eas­i­ly view these pieces in per­son, if we are so inclined, but also to gain an over­all sense of the achieve­ment that hav­ing saved them represents.

Inter­wo­ven with­in the sto­ries of the art­works’ fates are col­or­ful pic­tures of Loebl’s wartime expe­ri­ences in Ger­many and her family’s time­ly escape to Nazi-occu­pied Bel­gium; here, they were safe­ly hid­den dur­ing the Holo­caust. Per­son­al anec­dotes illu­mi­nate what life was like for the teenaged Suzanne there, and how her fam­i­ly final­ly made it to the safe­ty of America.

Suzanne Loebl’s fam­i­ly had lived in Ger­many for hun­dreds of years, sub­ject to famil­iar cycles of accep­tance and per­se­cu­tion, and final­ly becom­ing part of soci­ety and feel­ing at home. But all the wealth they had accu­mu­lat­ed and all the rela­tion­ships her fam­i­ly had forged came to a crash­ing end with the rise of Hitler.

Loe­bl illus­trates the desire of the Nazis to gath­er up as much art as they could from the peo­ple and insti­tu­tions in the coun­tries they occu­pied. Both the sub­ject mat­ter of the paint­ings and the nation­al­i­ty of the artists them­selves were of inter­est. Hitler’s offi­cers lust­ed after this art, all the while main­tain­ing that they despised the pieces they stole. 

Loebl’s fam­i­ly owned many his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant prints and paint­ings that Hitler desired, plus a grand selec­tion of expen­sive Bauhaus fur­ni­ture, near­ly all of which became vic­tims of Nazi plun­der. To our ben­e­fit, she takes us beyond the art and brings us deeply into the sto­ry of the deal­ers and col­lec­tors who were involved in the lives of the artworks.

The writ­ing is crisp through­out, and each seg­ment about a piece of art brings us deft­ly into the next one. We delve into the works one at a time, and then sud­den­ly we are able to see them all togeth­er, and in that moment we grasp the immen­si­ty of the artis­tic loss brought about by the ruth­less Nazi plun­der. Many of the artists were mur­dered in the con­cen­tra­tion camps at the same time that their cre­ations graced the gal­leries of the high-lev­el Ger­mans who stole them.

The parts of the book that focus on the resti­tu­tion of the art­works are par­tic­u­lar­ly grat­i­fy­ing, and they are great­ly enhanced by the inclu­sion in the book of cap­sule biogra­phies of the peo­ple who made it hap­pen, many of whom were Jew­ish. These bios are offered in one of the two appen­dices fol­low­ing the main text. We get to know on a per­son­al lev­el the full range of both the col­lec­tors who owned the art and those who decid­ed their fate. 

Loe­bl wrote the book togeth­er with Abi­gail Wilentz, who, as an expert in art, design, and pho­tog­ra­phy, added an extra dimen­sion to these chap­ters. Gor­geous col­or prints of some of the most famous loot­ed paint­ings grace Plun­der and Sur­vival’s pages, mak­ing a vis­cer­al visu­al state­ment about the cul­tur­al val­ue of the works of art. Paint­ings by Egon Schiele, Gus­tav Klimt, Oskar Kokosch­ka, and the like make this book not only an intel­lec­tu­al achieve­ment but a beau­ti­ful state­ment in its own right.