Philip Saunders, a specialist in stolen art, estimated in 1997 that 100,000 pieces of valuable art are "still missing from the Nazi occupation." Reflecting the diverse areas to which Jews fled from Nazism, claimants come from far and wide--Israel, Canada, Australia, and the United States as well as European countries. They range from individuals who are trying to find art that was displayed in their former homes to art collectors who had loaned pieces to museums and galleries that fell prey to Nazi theft. In some cases, documentary evidence overwhelmingly supports the claimants. In other instances, just as Estelle Sapir could produce no Majdanek death certificate for her father when she approached Credit Suisse, the original owners of the confiscated art may know that a piece of art is theirs when they see it, and yet the difficulty of documenting ownership remains.

Artworks account for only a part of the household assets stolen by the Nazis. When Soviet forces reached Auschwitz in January 1945, they found six storerooms that contained hundreds of thousands of men's suits and women's coats. Property of this kind--furniture, furs, family heirlooms--may be "too small" to be considered by Holocaust-era assets negotiations 50 years later. But when one considers that the Nazis killed nearly six million Jews, uprooting millions more and turning them into refugees, and that the expropriation of Jewish property was an essential ingredient in Nazi policy, then the amount of lost household assets--small and large--becomes utterly mind-boggling.