c. 1996 Religion News Service

VIENNA _ While art dealers came by the hundreds seeking bargains, Fran Laufer traveled here from New York not to bid, but to bear witness to the cruel past that made this auction necessary.”I came because I couldn’t control myself,”said the Polish-born great-grandmother who escaped the ovens of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.”I always lived with the feeling of what happened to me. I love to dance and sing and make jokes. But it never left me, this fact, and it drew me here.” Bargain hunters far outnumbered Holocaust survivors in the crowd of more than 1,000 who gathered in Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts Tuesday (Oct. 29) for the two-day Mauerbach benefit auction. Up for bid were some 1,000 unclaimed paintings and hundreds of other objects owned by Austrian Jews whose homes were looted by the Nazis during World War II .

Adolf Hitler had planned to erect a perverse shrine of the most valuable booty in a museum in Linz, the Austrian city where he spent his student years.

No one is sure of the exact number of objects stolen from Jewish homes. Estimates range up to 100,000. About 20,000 paintings, tapestries, pieces of jewelry and other valuables have been reclaimed.

But numerous possessions, most of them stored in a 14th-century monastery in Mauerbach, Austria, were never reclaimed in a country where some 200,000 Jews lived before World War II but only a few thousand survived the savagery of the Third Reich.

The paintings, many by artists from Austria and southern Germany, suggest that the Jews of Austria, like those in Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, were well-assimilated into the cultural mainstream. Only one piece is overtly Jewish.”In the Schtetl,”an 1894 painting by Ludwig Knaus, depicts Jewish families gathered on a street, playing, reading and talking.

The sale could raise more than $10 million for Jewish victims and their offspring. It also marks the last chapter in the Austrian government’s tortuous, 12-year process of tracing owners of the stolen treasures. By last year, the government had turned over to the Federation of Austrian Jewish Communities artwork for whom owners or heirs could not be found.

The federation intends to distribute the money among the 1,200 Austrian Jewish survivors and 25,000 other survivors and heirs outside the country.”It won’t be an easy task,”said Paul Grosz, president of the federation,”because we have to make careful and difficult judgments.” Nonetheless, Grosz was overjoyed by the high prices that many auctioned pieces were claiming.”It’s exceeded my expectations,”he said.

Several paintings at the auction fetched extraordinary prices, and in many cases the art sold for 10 times the”official estimates.”Christie’s of London, which is conducting the auction without fee, acknowledged it set the estimates on the low side to attract buyers.

An oil-on-canvas painting of flowers by 17th-century French artist Abraham Mignon topped $1 million. It was bought by an anonymous buyer in New York who was said to be dedicating the painting to an Israeli university. Another Mignon painting sold for $516,000.

Other work, by artists Pietro Di Francesco Degli Orioli, Abraham Brueghel, and Mattheus Von Helmont, fetched well over $100,000 each.”There are some high-quality pieces here that have been well-preserved,”said Fernando Gergallo, a Rome art dealer.”But a lot of it is out of my range.” Gergallo started bidding on an oil-on-wood painting of the Madonna by Orioli, and was prepared to pay up to $80,000. It went for $220,000.”These benefit auctions do have an effect because the prices will go higher than at a normal auction,”said Klaus Spindler, a furniture dealer from Munich.

Several dealers said they attended the auction primarily as spectators.”I think this is a wonderful occasion for getting in touch with the past,”said Drew Baker of London.”It’s a living history.” But he said that few dealers, himself included, would bid on pieces for”sentimental”or emotional reasons.”It’s a business decision. If I buy something here it’s because of its intrinsic value and not because it belonged to a victim of the Holocaust.” Yonjky Widjaya, an art collector from Jakarta, said he had no idea that the auction was a benefit.”I came because it’s affordable,”he said before the sale got under way.

For others, the auction carries far more meaning. The government hopes the sale will help heal deep wounds that remain from World War II. Many Jewish leaders see it as just and overdue reparation for war crimes.

For Christie’s the sale could yield good publicity. Some dealers said the auction house was clearly hoping to benefit from the positive afterglow the sale would engender.

Christie’s usually earns 15 percent on all sales, and an additional 10 percent on sales above $80,000.”You can’t buy this kind of publicity,”Baker said.

The auction comes as some European governments are wrestling with their deceitful behavior during the war years and amid a resurgence across Europe of populist, right-wing politicians, particularly in Austria, France and Italy.

The Swiss government, which signed a neutrality pact during the war, has seen its image tainted by evidence that it bought from the Nazis gold that was looted from Jews. Swiss researchers also have uncovered evidence that their countrymen made secret pacts with East European countries after the war in which dormant bank accounts belonging to Jews were used to compensate Swiss businesses whose assets had been seized in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the former Yugoslavia.

In Austria, the government has had a mixed record with regard to righting the wrongs of history. In 1988, it acknowledged that it had been part of the driving force behind the Holocaust.

But Grosz and others say Austrians by and large remain steadfast that they were”victims”and not perpetrators of the ethnic purge.

He points to the rising fortunes of Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party, which captured 27 percent of the vote in European parliament elections earlier this month. Its leader, Joerg Haider, has expressed esteem for veterans of the Nazi secret police.

When asked why it took the government decades to resolve the art property issue, Grosz, 71, said,”because the powers that be in Austria kind of figured it belonged to them. After all, they had lost houses by bombings, fathers by shooting and so on. And there was heirless property. So why should anyone take the initiative in a country that had its state victimized? Austria was under the understanding that it was the first victim of the war.” But the auction of stolen treasures has focused world attention on the fact that Austrians were among the most fervent supporters of Hitler’s ruthless regime.

The last stroke of the auctioneer’s gavel may bring some sort of closure to Holocaust survivors like Fran Laufer, it may also allow Austria to emerge from decades of guilt and denial.”Now,”Grosz said,”they want to get rid of a burden.”

MJP END HEILBRONNER