Diamonds Are Forever. So Should Justice Be.

Brooklyn, New York -- I grew up in Argentina in the 1960s, when nobody needed to whisper that there were Nazis among us. What was whispered, and not always, was that some of the men who had stepped off the boats after the war had brought more than their luggage. Money, we heard. Jewelry. Paintings. Things that had belonged to Jewish families in Europe until those families were stripped of everything and sent away.

One story in particular stayed with me, and I'll tell it the way it stayed, which is imperfectly. I won't name the woman, partly because I never learned how her claim ended and partly because after sixty years I don't trust myself with every detail. The core of it, though, has never moved.

We were in seventh grade. A classmate's birthday, one of those afternoons in somebody else's house with the parents hovering and the cake still to come. The woman, a mother of one of the guests, walked into a room and saw a painting on the wall, and she knew it. It had hung in her family's home in Budapest. It had disappeared after her parents were taken to the camps. And here it was, in a living room in [neighborhood], on a Saturday, with children running past it.

I thought of her at once when I read what happened in Mar del Plata this week.

On Friday a federal judge, Santiago Inchausti, ordered that Portrait of a Lady, an eighteenth-century canvas now attributed to Giacomo Ceruti, be returned to Marei von Saher, daughter-in-law and sole heir of Jacques Goudstikker, the Amsterdam dealer whose collection was looted after the Germans entered the Netherlands in May 1940. The painting had been missing for roughly eighty years. Then, in 2025, a Dutch journalist from AD found it in the photographs of a real-estate listing, hanging over a sofa in a house for sale in Mar del Plata. The house belonged to Patricia Kadgien, daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a financial official of the Reich who slipped out of Europe after the war and ended his days in Argentina. He's now burried in Mar del Plata.

Consider the itinerary. A painting leaves a dealer's gallery in Amsterdam under the boot, crosses an ocean, sits in a seaside town for decades, and surfaces again because somebody wanted to sell a house and the agent took a decent photograph. There is something extraordinary in that, and something quite Argentine.

Adolf Hitler examining stolen art.

What followed was less picturesque. When investigators arrived, the painting was not where the photograph said it would be. It reappeared later, through the family's lawyer. Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were charged with concealment, and under the agreement the court has now approved they renounce any claim to the work, accept two years of probation and make a donation to a local hospital. The important part is the last line of the ruling: the painting goes back to the family it was taken from. PS. It runs in the family when it comes to think of it: Juan Carlos Cortegoso and Patricia Kadgien had stolen the painting again! Only, this time from the legitimate hairs.

I care about that more than I expected to, and I suspect I know why. The Argentina of my childhood lived comfortably with certain silences. We knew who had found refuge there. We knew that fortunes had arrived whose origins nobody could quite explain, and we heard, at birthday parties and elsewhere, about paintings and jewelry that had once belonged to someone else. Knowing is not the same as doing anything about it. This time an Argentine court did not look away.

And it shouldn't stop with one painting. Authorities have seized other works from properties connected to the Kadgien family and are examining their provenance. If any of them can be traced to victims of Nazi persecution, they should follow Portrait of a Lady home. The same goes, and here I'll be blunt, for what doesn't hang on walls: the jewelry, the stones, the objects small enough to travel in a coat pocket in 1945 and to sit in a drawer in 2026. Eighty years do not launder provenance. A daughter is not answerable for her father's crimes; she is answerable for what she does once she learns where the things in her house came from. And let's be hones: She knew and probably knows a lot more.

The Holocaust was a program of murder, and it was also, on an enormous scale, a program of theft. Apartments were emptied, accounts drained, businesses signed over, rings and watches and diamonds taken from people who in most cases would not live to ask for them back. The victims disappeared. Their property did not. It went on, as property does, changing hands and gathering a new respectability with each one, until a canvas above a sofa in Mar del Plata could look as innocent as any other piece of furniture. Inside it, all the while: Amsterdam in 1940, a dealer running for his life, a Reich functionary's escape, a house by the sea, and finally a judge willing to write that this belongs to someone else.