World War II happened in the 1940s. After the war ended, reparations began to be made. The last "hostages" of WWII, the artworks, have started slowly going back to their rightful owners. The movie Woman in Gold focuses on the efforts of Austrian Maria Altmann in retrieving the Klimt paintings, including one of her aunt Adele wearing a gold dress and a diamond choker.
– Maria Altmann (Woman in Gold, 2015)
I have to do what I can to keep these memories alive because people forget, especially the young.
She enlisted the help of Randy Schoenberg, a lawyer who has Austrian ancestry (being the grandson of Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl, composers who spent time at the Altmann home, according to Maria). He had to quit his job and support his wife and two kids while pursuing the Altmann art recovery case against the Austrian government. He was able to bring the case all the way to the US Supreme Court and then to the Austrian arbitration panel. This panel ruled in favour of Schoenberg, allowing the paintings to be returned to Maria. She took up Ronald Lauder's offer and had the Woman in Gold exhibited permanently in his Neue Galerie in New York. Randy then started his own law firm, specialising in art restitution.
I liked the movie because it showed that people who were wronged have a chance to get back what is rightfully theirs. What I wonder, though, is if people other than the Jews had the same opportunity. The Jews' sufferings during the Holocaust is well-documented and there are a number of memorials to honour their dead. Reparations and restitutions are under way. But what about the people in Africa and in Asia? I think that stories from these continents should be popularised too; otherwise, the future generations would only know one side of the story of recovery, the European theatre of war. In that case, it's not a matter of forgetting, as Maria Altmann asserted. It will be a matter of ignorance because the older generation did not tell the story to the younger.