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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, Search Engine listeners. Our colleagues over at Odyssey, the network that distributes Search Engine, have a new show, and we wanted to share an episode with you. The show is called Family Lore. Every family has stories that get passed down. On this show, the host, Lloyd Lockridge, investigates those stories to find out what's true.
Chapter 2: What is the story behind the granddaughter's quest for looted art?
In this one, the granddaughter of a prolific Jewish art collector who fled Europe during World War II embarks on a quest to recover looted art. Without further ado, let me play you host Lloyd Lockridge's interview.
So could you tell me your name and where you're from?
Yes, my name is Charlene Von Saer, and I was born in the UK and currently live in Connecticut in the US. My family came over to the US on the QE2. My sister, my parents, and two dogs, and the car, all on the QE2. I know my parents were happy and ready to start life in the U.S. And we have been in Greenwich, Connecticut, since 1975.
For Charlene Von Sayer, growing up in Connecticut was a pretty idyllic experience. She remembers learning how to ride her bike on Todd Lane, her parents running alongside her as she wobbled forward with nervous excitement. In the winter, Charlene's mother, Mariah Von Sayer, a retired figure skater, taught her to ice skate.
So when we joined the skating club, it was kind of a big deal for everyone to see my mom skate around. And then, you know, my sister and I took lessons there, and I continued because I liked it.
She liked it and she was very good at it. As she got older, she began competing at a very high level.
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Chapter 3: How did Charlene Von Saer describe her childhood in Connecticut?
The highest, in fact. Charlene and Nancy Kerrigan trained under the same coach. And in 1993, Charlene won the gold medal at the British Championships. In 1994, she competed at the Olympics in Norway. But unlike her friend Nancy Kerrigan, Charlene didn't represent the United States. Ultimately, she decided to represent England, her place of birth.
And those probably weren't her only two options, because Charlene's background is somewhat complex. She was born in England to a father who was born in Amsterdam but raised in America, and a mother who was born and raised in West Germany, which no longer exists.
Apparently, my first language was German. But when my sister and I entered school in the U.S., we didn't understand anything because we were speaking German. And my mom said, no more German in the house, only English.
Despite losing the German, Charlene was always aware of her European roots. As a young girl, she and her sister would go to Holland to visit their paternal grandmother, Daisy.
I loved my grandmother, Daisy, very much. My sister and I visited her in the summers often.
And there in Holland, Charlene would pick up bits and pieces about what her grandmother's life was like growing up.
Her mother was a very famous soprano in Vienna. And Daisy grew up in Vienna amongst a very affluent inner circle. People like Freud, Klimt. Klimt, in fact, drew a portrait of her and I think she learned her first, you know, brushstroke from him. Yeah, they were socializing among a very elite class.
Tell me, as a grandmother, what was she like?
She was extremely generous, gracious, nurturing, loving, warm and cozy. You know, she was that sort of warm and fuzzy grandmother, but a little bit fancier. She was easy to hug. Let's put it that way.
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Chapter 4: What significant events shaped Daisy's life during World War II?
But she spoke about Jacques and how wonderful he was and how much he would have loved us. She always said that. And she also told me that he loved food and he would sort of satisfy his cravings by reading cookbooks.
So he was like way ahead of his time. Nowadays, everyone sits around watching the Cooking Channel or Reels or whatever. And what else did she tell you about him?
That he was romantic and, you know, gave her lots of beautiful little gifts and jewelry and was very loving. I don't know why, but I didn't think to ask more in-depth questions. Maybe because we were just enjoying each other's company and in the present. So I don't know why I didn't and I do regret not asking more.
But clearly she didn't want to tell me or talk about it, otherwise she would have.
But still, Daisy would take Charlene and her sister down memory lane.
And we would jump in her car and drive by Nine Rota Castle and Ostermere, which was their actual home that they lived in, and Herengacht 458, which was my grandfather's place of business, his art gallery. And she would tell us that these properties were once hers. And I guess as a kid, I never understood then why they weren't still hers.
And I do clearly remember she would look at me and my sister and she called us like her suite. She would say, my suite, things were different before the war. And that's really all I got from her on that.
As a child, Charlene didn't quite understand why her grandmother was reserved in talking about the love of her life, Jacques, and she didn't pry. She had a loving relationship with Daisy, and that's all that really mattered to both of them. In 1996, when Charlene was in her 20s, Daisy passed away, and Charlene went to Europe to pay her respects.
While she was there, she obtained her grandmother's diary. And in the pages of that diary, Charlene encountered, for the first time, a full picture of her grandmother's life, especially the aspects of her life she didn't want to talk about. Charlene's grandfather, Jacques Goudsticker, did not merely run an art gallery.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Daisy and Jacques face while fleeing the Nazis?
I think it was like a Lincoln Zephyr or something like that. They had to leave it on the side of the road. There was too much traffic. And they ultimately made it on the last ship out.
Daisy and Jacques fled on May 14, 1940, four days after the surprise invasion and one day before the Netherlands signed a capitulation agreement with Hitler, leaving the nation under full Nazi control. They left with only a few personal belongings, including a little black book, which contained the inventory for all of Jacques' art.
Jacques kept the book in his jacket pocket and strapped to Daisy's chest with Charlene's father, Edo, who was only about a year old. Everything else, their beautiful home, the gallery, the furniture, the art, it was all left behind.
There was a lot, a lot of beautiful things that were left behind. I mean, my grandmother packed like a little beach bag and threw some jewelry in there and some diapers for my father and they left.
With regard to these possessions, especially the art that was left behind, what becomes of it? What happens next to the art collection in particular?
Hermann Goering had sort of scouted out all of the top art collections, I think, prior to the war. So he knew exactly where his first stops would be. So Hermann Goering and Alois Mietel basically took over and stole all of the artwork. Miedel stayed and ran the gallery with Jacques' entire infrastructure in place because he was very well respected.
The Nazis took over the gallery. They sold some pieces and looted others. The marvelous business Jacques ran was completely desecrated by Hitler's second-in-command, Hermann Goering, and a man named Alois Miedel. Meidel was actually married to a Jewish woman, and the couple had initially moved from Munich to Amsterdam for fear of rising anti-Semitism in Germany.
But as the Nazis invaded, Meidel was able to curry favor with Goring, and his Jewish wife was designated an honorary Aryan. And Alois Meidel not only commandeered Jacques' gallery, he moved into the Goudsticker home, where he once hosted a gala to celebrate Hitler's birthday. But despite their best attempts, the Nazis did not erase all traces of Jacques Goudsticker.
Because on the back of each painting, there was a literal Goudsticker stamp of approval. It was a little red wax seal, which guaranteed the authenticity of each individual work. And knowing the value of a Goudsticker imprimatur, the Nazis left the stamps alone.
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Chapter 6: What happened to Jacques Goudsticker's art gallery during the war?
And then my grandmother had to continue on the journey without her husband.
The ship arrived in Falmouth, England, but Daisy was not able to get off. This was because her passport was issued by Austria, where she was born, and she was considered an alien enemy. So Jacques' body was taken off the ship and Daisy was not allowed to accompany him.
She was able to plan the funeral, though, in Falmouth. I think that's the southwestern coast, a beautiful, beautiful place. She was not allowed off the boat, and she made sure that he had a good spot overlooking the water and that they play his favorite song, which was Cole Porter's Night and Day at the funeral.
And she was lucky because at that time, most people were just thrown overboard if they died.
Man, that is just, you know, I'm just trying to imagine what your grandmother must have been thinking. I mean, weeks earlier, you know.
Life was great. Yeah, life was amazing a few weeks earlier.
It's hard to fathom such a swift and devastating turn of events. It was spring in Amsterdam. I imagine the tulips were in full bloom, the cafes were exploding onto the sidewalk, and packs of cyclists poured through the streets like synchronized schools of fish. Daisy and Jacques were in love. They had a beautiful home, a thriving art business, a vibrant social life, and a newborn baby.
And over the course of just four days, they have to leave it all behind. Then, after escaping by the skin of their teeth, Jacques, a loving husband and father, dies in a freak accident, and Daisy can't even be there to lay him to rest. The last time she sees him, he is being carried off a ship, alone in a foreign land. And with little money and even fewer options, Daisy sets sail to the Americas.
She continues on. She lands in Canada and spends some time there before making her way to New York. And that's that's where they stayed for quite a while.
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Chapter 7: How did Daisy's diary reveal hidden truths about her past?
And a year after my father passed away, we received a call from a Dutch journalist named Pieter den Hollander. And in so many words, he said, do you realize you have a claim against the Dutch government? And We looked at each other and my sister was there too. And we were not quite sure what he was talking about. So before we knew it, he was in Connecticut.
He came over to our home and we had a long discussion. And then he said, oh, do you have any of the paintings in your home? And we did, we had one small painting and he said, can you please show it to me? And it was upstairs in my mom's bedroom. And we went up and he took the painting off the wall. and turned it around and showed us the back, which we had never done.
We didn't even think to look at the back of a painting. And there was the red wax seal and the stickers that my grandfather used to identify his paintings. And Peter then explained to us that there were many, many more of these that were in the possession of the Dutch government that shouldn't be and that we had a claim to them.
But how would Charlene and her mother know which pieces of art to look for? Yes, there was the red wax seal, but what if those have been removed? And what about the more scattered and elusive portion that was looted by Herman Goring? Finding them would be hard enough even if they knew exactly what they were looking for.
Well, to deal with that challenge, they were left with an item, almost like a treasure map. It was something that Daisy had been holding onto since the day Jacques died, until the day she died. Back in 1940, after Jacques died tragically on the boat he and Daisy had boarded to escape the Nazis, Daisy had to identify his body.
And as she said her last goodbye to Jacques, she reached into his pocket and removed something from his jacket.
When Jacques' body was recovered, Daisy had the wherewithal to take his little black book out of his jacket pocket, which inventoried the entire collection.
The entire collection. Jacques had recorded everything in this little black book. And Daisy had held onto it for all those years. Maybe as a keepsake, a kind of totem that connected her to the love of her life. Or maybe because somewhere deep down, she knew that someone might someday pick up the torch.
When Charlene and her mother embarked on this journey to recover their family's possessions, it was the late 90s. Information in general was not as accessible as it is today. And if you wanted something, you often had to go out and get it.
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Chapter 8: What steps did Charlene take to reclaim her family's art collection?
After 60 years, the painting was returned to its rightful owner, the descendants of Jacques Goudsticker. The title of the painting was The Temptation of St. Anthony. That's St. Anthony, as in the patron saint of lost items.
That first painting coming back sort of set the stage. It sort of made everything become a reality. And at least for me, I thought, okay, this really is happening. We really are going to do this. And if it's one piece at a time or a group of paintings from the Dutch government, whatever, we're going to keep going and we're going to fight for this.
Right. So you've got some wind in your sails after this, right? And what's the pace going forward? Are you recovering things all the time? Is it slow and steady?
No, it's slow and frustrating. Yeah, very slow and frustrating. And I know my mother, at least along the way, sometimes felt like we should throw the towel in. But we didn't. And I think she's happy that we didn't. And she's been pretty strong along the way. And it worked out. And it's still working.
From 2001 to 2006, the paintings trickled in. It was frustrating, as Charlin puts it. But in 2007, after almost 10 years of legal maneuvering, the Dutch government returned the Goudsticker collection to the von Sayers. 202 paintings worth millions. So I want to know what it was like to hang one of those paintings in your home.
It felt like we had restored a little bit of my grandfather's legacy. We had corrected an historical injustice. It felt amazing to hold something in my hands that my grandfather once held and once loved. Yeah, it just, it was a very good feeling.
the von Sayers are still tracking down pieces of art. Usually something will appear at an auction, and in most, if not all cases, the art will have changed hands many times before it resurfaces. But to that rule, there is one very special exception. And it starts with our guest in the last episode, Paul Post.
If you didn't have a chance to listen, Paul is a Dutch retiree who spent the last decade or so investigating a case of missing diamonds. The diamonds were stolen by Nazis from the diamond bourse in Amsterdam. And Paul's father, who worked at the diamond bourse, had left behind a diary and documents with various leads.
It begins, I believe, with a gentleman, Paul Post, who had found a diary in his father's attic.
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