“The painting found me.” That is how Deborah Zoellner (Santiago, Chile, 1963) sums up the beginning of her search for her family’s artworks, stolen during the years of Nazism in Europe. It was in 2000 when Zoellner, a descendant of a prominent German-Jewish family, received a surprise call from the Netherlands informing her that a painting in a museum in the Dutch city of Groningen had belonged to her paternal grandmother, Elsbeth Isaac, and therefore belonged to her heirs. The work was a painting by the German artist Max Liebermann (1847–1935) titled Düne bei Nordwijk mit Kind (Dune near Noordwijk with a child), which Elsbeth, along with a number of valuable possessions, had entrusted in 1940 in Amsterdam to a confidant when she decided to leave for the United States in the face of the advancing Nazi threat and persecution of Jews, but which she never recovered after the end of World War II (1939–1945).

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