Stolen Legacy (ebook)

Argumento de Stolen Legacy (ebook)

Stolen Legacy is a non-fiction historical narrative centered on a Jewish family’s legal battle to reclaim ownership of a building stolen from them by the Nazis in the 1930s. The building at Krausenstrasse 17/18 in Berlin was seized by a German businessman with direct ties to the very top of the Nazi Party hierarchy and German Railways—the state-owned organization that transported millions of Jews across Europe to the death camps. He was the head of the Victoria Insurance Company, then and now one of Germany’s top insurance companies which, according to the book, played a role in insuring the Auschwitz death camp during World War Two.

The book, written by the daughter of one of the original owners of the building, details the history of the Wolff family’s ownership of the building, its confiscation by the Nazis, and the family’s legal fight to reclaim it. There has been no previous written account of a successful claim of a property seized by the Nazis in Germany. The U.S. Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues, Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, has written the book’s foreword.

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.

Dina Gold (Washington, D.C.) is a former BBC investigative journalist and television producer. She currently serves as co-chair of the Washington Jewish Film Festival and is a senior editor at Moment magazine, the largest independent Jewish magazine in North America.

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.

An exceptional adventure in Holocaust literature. Dina Gold combines investigative journalism with a keen sense of history to uncover a story everyone should read.

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.

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.0