Lauren Comiteau, Voice of America, May 13, 2003

As she walks through the Christie's auction house in Amsterdam, Lili Gutmann shows a visitor the objects that once decorated her family's home in Heemstede, a wealthy village outside Amsterdam. She stops before a late 18th century Italian settee.

Up until last year, she says, nobody could find this piece. Suddenly, the Dutch located it in a very public place.

All these year later, Lili Gutmann can laugh. But the story of how the family furniture ended up in a Dutch palace museum is anything but funny, or even unique.

During World War II, Lili's father was forced to sell some of the family's collection to the Nazis; other pieces were simply taken. Both of her parents were later killed in concentration camps. After the war, Lili and her brother, Bernard, returned to their house. It was empty. They registered their losses with the Dutch government, which had the job of returning all looted art found by allied forces at the end of the war.

It took three Dutch commissions and about 50 more years of legal battles and bureaucratic wrangling before the family learned it was getting back more than 200 items, all held by the Dutch government since 1945.

Right after the war, the Dutch government refused to return anything the Gutmann's sold to the Nazis, saying the sales were voluntary. But a 1952 court case sided with the Gutmann's, recognizing the sales were forced. The Gutmann's were then told they had to buy back their own property from the Dutch, since their father received money for it. In fact, he never did.

While Lili and her brother, Bernard, got back some items, they could not afford the rest. After her brother died in 1994, his sons took up the fight.

Bernard's son, Nick Goodman, applauds a recent change in Dutch policy that allows for restitution, as well as the government's admission that its past policies were callous, cold and unjust. But it was only last year that the Gutmanns learned they would be getting back their property, and Nick Goodman says his aunt Lili was horrified when she learned that the Dutch had her family's collections on display in their most prominent museums all along.

Mr. Goodman says one of the family's silver pieces was even listed as a highlight in the museum's catalogue. The auction, he says, will provide a small bit of closure. But both he and his aunt say there will never be justice.

Nick Goodman says you can not get the people back, but getting the possessions means a lot. The Gutmann's made more than 950,000 euros, more than $1 million, from the sale of theirs. They plan to divide the proceeds among the family.

As for the settee, Christie's experts were hoping the Palace museum would bid for it, finally becoming the rightful owner of the piece it displayed for years. But in the end, it did not, so the piece is headed back to Italy, where it originally came from, to become part of a different family's private collection. It fetched more than $15,000 on the open market.