Goodman Simon - The Orpheus Clock : the search for my familys art treasures stolen by the Nazis

Bernard with his typewriter in between flights, 1948.

The boxes were rather ordinary, the sort of musty, collapsing-in-on-themselves corrugated containers that one might find gathering dust in millions of attics and basements. They had arrived from Germany, of all places, at my brothers sunny hillside home in Los Angeles in the fall of 1994the last tired remnants of our late fathers estate.

Our father, Bernard Goodman, had died in Venice a few months before, on the day after his eightieth birthday, while swimming in the Adriatic Sea. The night before he had enjoyed a slap-up dinner at Harrys Bar. Cipriani, the owner, had given Pa a bottle of grappa on the house. A noted athlete in his university days at Cambridge, my father had remained physically active all his yearsit was not his body that life had brokenand despite his age, he was a keen swimmer. According to the authorities, he had apparently suffered either a stroke or a heart attack and had lost consciousness in the water. As Eva, his longtime companion, had screamed and waved her arms from the shore, the lifeguards had plunged in and dragged him out, but it was too late. The official ruling was death by drowning.

His death was unexpected and somewhat unusual; eighty-year-old men do not often die while swimming in the sea. But perhaps that was only fitting. Our father had lived an unusual and unexpected life.

We arranged for his burial in a small wood outside Tbingen in Germanyand through various courts and solicitors I cleared up his financial affairs, which, sadly, were rather meager. By the time of his death he was living in what might be called genteel povertycomfortable enough, but far removed from the circumstances into which we vaguely understood he had been born.

Then came the boxes, packed with papers and documents our father had painstakingly saved over half a century. Curious, not at all certain what we might find, my brother, Nick, and I started to go through them, ripping through the shipping labels printed in Germanthe language our father had once vowed never to speak againand laying out the brittle contents in fragile piles on Nicks dining-room table.

There were sheaves of yellowing notes written in our fathers own hand and blurry carbons of letters that he had pounded out on an ancient typewriter. There were stacks of government documents in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Czechexcept for the Czech, my father could read and speak all of themtheir pages festooned with coat-of-arms letterheads and official stamps and seals. There were long-forgotten receipts and bills of sale, and black-and-gold, expired British passports with visa pages covered top to bottom with entry and exit stamps. Shockingly to modern eyes, the prewar visa stamps from Germany featured the Nazi eagle clutching a swastika. There were some dog-eared, old art catalogs, some faded museum brochures, and in a single, unlabeled envelope three black-and-white photographic negativesthe old kind, each some three by five inchesof paintings that I didnt specifically recognize but which appeared to be French Impressionist paintings. The stacks grew higher, and then higher still.

The appearance of my fathers papers gave no outward indication of secrets long concealed, no promise of dramatic revelationscertainly not life-changing ones. Yet, as we began to look more closely at them, to examine the details, certain things stood out.

The art collection that we understood had once been owned by our fathers parents, the grandparents we had never known, consisted of works by some of the greatest masters, old and newDegas, Renoir, Botticelli, Memling, Cranach, Guardi. There were also inventories of priceless Renaissance sculptures in gold and silver, of valuable tapestries and Louis XV furniture, and then a photostat of an aged, wrinkled handwritten note from my grandfather, describing the location of certain artworks and signed P. for Papi.

Curiously, and in retrospect ominously, amid those same documents, often on the same pages, were references to some of historys most infamous figuresAdolf Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Gring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenbergand to the monuments dedicated to themselves: the planned Fhrermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz and the Reichsmarschalls estate at Carinhall. Coupled with them were the names of men I did not then recognize, but who nonetheless somehow sounded sinisterHaberstock and Hofer, Bhler and Plietzsch and Miedl.

Within those stacks of my fathers papersstacks already tipping over and starting to spread, glacierlike, across my brothers tablewere references to Theresienstadt, the Nazis model concentration camp, and to the death chambers of Auschwitz. There were allusions to the Nazi occupation of Holland, to the SS and the Gestapo, to the French Resistance and the American World War II spy service, the OSS, to Scotland Yard and the international police agency Interpol. Then came memorandums from various postwar restitution bureaus in West Germany, France, and Holland, followed by notations concerning corrupt Swiss art dealers, spies and collaborators, hoards of priceless art packed into Parisian warehouses and Austrian salt minesand much more.