Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin - Softcover

Gold, Dina J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634254279 ISBN 13: 9781634254274

Publisher: American Bar Association, 2016

Synopsis

“This former BBC journalist's passionate search for justice is a suspenseful confrontation with World War II history. A fascinating journey.” ―Anne-Marie O'Connor, national bestselling author of The Lady in Gold

Dina Gold grew up hearing her grandmother's tales of the glamorous life in Berlin she once led before the Nazis came to power and her dreams of recovering a huge building she claimed belonged to the family - though she had no papers to prove ownership. When the Wall fell in 1989, Dina decided to battle for restitution.

When the Third Reich was defeated in 1945 the building lay in the Soviet sector – just past Checkpoint Charlie – and beyond legal reach.

About this title

About the Author:

Dina Gold was born and brought up in Britain. She is now an American citizen living in Washington, DC where she is on the board of the Jewish Community Center and co-chair of the Washington Jewish Film Festival. A senior editor at Moment magazine, she started her career in London as a financial journalist after postgraduate studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Later, at the BBC, she worked as an investigative reporter and television producer.

Review:

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 Holocaust―the 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 property―of those who were murdered and the minority who escaped or otherwise survived―was 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)

About this edition

• Publisher: American Bar Association
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1634254279
• ISBN 13: 9781634254274
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270