Śladami nieznanych przedwojennych żydowskich kolekcjonerów i właścicieli dzieł sztuki
In the footsteps of unknown pre-war Jewish collectors and owners of works of art

Summary/Abstract: In pre-war Poland there was a large group of Jewish collectors and owners of works of art, paintings in particular. The names of some of them appeared in the catalogs of prestigious exhibitions organized in Warsaw, Cracow or Lviv, while many others did not make their collections publicly available or have done so incognito. Almost all of them perished in the Holocaust, and their works of Polish (including Polish-Jewish) and foreign artists and their entire assets were lost as a result of Nazi confiscation or misappropriation by non-Jewish population. After the war, the existence of this deserving group for culture and art was completely erased from collective memory. It was only recently that the first publications devoted to certain representatives and communities of Polish Jewish collectors were published, combined with attempts to reconstruct their collections. These are isolated cases because they require difficult and often not fruitful archival research. One example of such an extensive and largely unresearched archive material of war loss questionnaires kept in many national archives. However, their usefulness in examining individual collections and their fate, as well as the fate of their Jewish owners, is limited. In this context, the greater is value of compensation files based on the the German Federal Restitution Law (BRüG) adopted in 1957, held in the Berlin Landesarchiv, since significant part of the holdings are applications of Polish Jews regarding their movable property appropriated by the Third Reich. This archive material, which has not yet been explored by Polish researchers, is a highly wealthy source of knowledge in many respects. There are files of tens of unknown (or completely forgotten) Polish Jewish art owners, including undeniable collectors.

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