The artwork behind a girl’s extraordinary escape from the Nazis during World War II

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Dolly’s story has remarkable parallels with the celebrated story of Anne Frank—who was hiding, at the same time, in another house less than two miles away Dolly, granddaughter of Siegbert and Johanna Margarete Stern Sotherby’s/via BBC A Great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky could sell for a record price at an auction in London next month. Behind the painting, however, is a family’s tragic and heroic story, revealed in an unpublished memoir, writes Stephen Smith. It starts with a seven-year-old girl hiding in a secret room. A woman tells her, “Be quiet, very quiet, you can’t make any noise, nobody can know you’re here, nobody! Can you hear me?” The woman is the nanny who took care of the girl — they are at her house. “If you make noise and anyone hears, we could all be killed by the Germans. Did you hear that?” She doesn’t know this place, the nanny’s house, nor the nanny’s family. But she’s going to spend the next two and a half years here, holed up in this tiny room, with no company—except a toy elephant named Jumbo—and all because of a deadly secret. The little girl, named Dolly, is Jewish. And all of this is set in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in 1943. Dolly’s story has remarkable parallels with the celebrated story of Anne Frank — who was hiding, at the same time, in another house less than two miles away. The two girls did not know each other, and never met. Anne Frank and her family were captured in August 1944 and sent to Auschwitz. Dolly’s mother, father and grandmother were murdered in the same death camp. But she survived. Luise and Herbert, Dolly Sotherby’s mother and father/via BBC Kandinsky in the dining room Anne’s first-person account of her time in hiding, The Diary of Anne Frank, would become one of the most important documents of the Holocaust . Dolly’s account of how she survived the war is featured in an unpublished memoir, but her story is more like a work of art than a book. It is a modernist masterpiece that is at the center of a campaign by the Delly family to recover an art collection they lost in the war. The acclaimed work is Murnau mit Kirche II (Murnau with the Church II, in free translation), painted in 1910 by the Russian master Wassily Kandinsky. The painting will be auctioned in London in March – and is expected to sell for more than $42 million, which would be a record for the artist. They say every canvas tells a story — and this one tells the story of Dolly’s family, who they were and what happened to them. The painting was once hung on the wall of the elegant house where Dolly’s grandparents lived in Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin. An old family photograph shows that the Kandinsky occupied pride of place in the dining room of Siegbert and Johanna Margarete Stern. One hundred years ago, the couple created a successful textile business. They connected with some of the most influential writers and thinkers of the time, including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein. Kandinsky painted the picture after visiting the village of Murnau in the Bavarian mountains Sotherby’s/via BBC Pursuit and coup The couple appreciated art and had an open mind. Their collection ranged from paintings by Dutch old masters to Renoir, including daring newcomers such as Munch and Kandinsky. Siegbert’s will has a record of over one hundred works of art. Next to Kandinsky on the list, he wrote “Landschaft”, which means “landscape” in German. The Sterns were also active in the Jewish community. In 1916 they helped create an organization to support Jews who had fled Eastern Europe and were living in poverty in Germany. With the rise of the Nazis, the Sterns and other Jewish families became targets of persecution. After Siegbert died in 1935, life became increasingly difficult. Some of their children had already left for Holland by this time, and Johanna Margarete followed, taking some of her furniture and paintings with her. Like many Jewish families, the Sterns raised funds by selling valuable artwork at bargain prices to unscrupulous dealers. In 1941, Johanna Margarete was declared stateless by the Nazis. They offered her a tantalizing prospect of freedom: she could obtain a visa, which would allow her to leave Holland with her family, in exchange for a painting by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour. But it was a trap. She delivered the painting but never received the visa. Johanna Margarete tried to hide but was captured in 1943, as were Dolly’s parents. In her memoirs, Dolly describes a desperate scene as her parents entrust her to the care of her nanny, Anna, while doing their best to protect her from the horror that is about to unfold. “It was late at night, I was already asleep, when my mother’s soft voice woke me up. ‘Dollychen, you have to get up now. It’s not morning yet.’ She came and sat on the bed with me, so did my father. They said they had to leave for two weeks, as the Germans wanted, but then they would come back… the doorbell suddenly rang very loudly and insistently, and my father opened it the door. Three officers of the Grüne Polizei (Nazi police force) came in, their boots making a loud clicking and banging noise. They shouted all sorts of orders brusquely for everyone to hurry: ‘Schnell, schnell, sonst schiessen wir. ‘ (Hurry, hurry, or we’ll shoot.) I hid behind Anna and I was scared, really scared.” Dolly’s parents were taken. It was the last time she would see them. The next day, she made the perilous journey across town to Anna’s house. The Nazis forced Jews like Dolly to wear a yellow star, but Anna unsewed the emblem from Dolly’s jacket and told her that from now on she should call her Aunty. Part of Anna’s house served as a doctor’s office and had a small, hidden annexe. Kandinsky’s painting on the wall in the dining room of the Sterns Sotherby’s house/via BBC ‘God Sees All’ “In the left corner on entering (was) a sink with cold water. An old chair and kitchen table more or less ( stood) in the middle, overlooking a wooden veranda and a deep garden. ‘This is your room.’ said Anna. ‘The door locks as soon as the outer door opens for patients, and only when the last doctor closes the door behind him does the lock open,'” wrote Dolly. That became her home for the next 30 months. She had two books, a children’s bible and a collection of fairy tales, which she read and reread. There was a faded poster on the wall that said “God Sees All,” and Dolly wondered how he could see everyone, even her. “On nights when there were also appointment hours, I had to sit in the dark in the fall and winter. Often I would lie on the floor and count the feet of patients waiting through the crack of the door.” Her loneliness was punctuated by the terror of the police raids. Anna hid Dolly under the floorboards or tucked her in a cupboard under the sink. She was “invisible” amid mops and mops. “When the German officers were in the kitchen, Anna would act innocent. She would make German jokes and handle the situation, but as soon as they were gone, she collapsed like a wet mop and shivered all over.” For a little girl, one of the hardest parts was being totally still, so when the Allies finally liberated Amsterdam in 1945 and Dolly was able to come out of hiding, the joy and relief came to her in everyday sounds. “Like many others, I had no shoes. That problem was solved with wooden clogs that were suddenly sold everywhere. A wooden sole and two straps at the top. I loved the noise. I was allowed to be there, and everyone could hear it, and everyone was allowed to know it. I was allowed to live again, to live fully.” Dolly lived to be almost 80 years old — and indeed, she enjoyed her life, judging by her memoirs. As far as Dolly’s living relatives are aware, none of that house is still alive – and the BBC has not been able to independently verify Dolly’s account of her experiences. The younger members of her family took on the task of researching the whereabouts of the Sterns’ missing art collection. In 2013 they discovered that there was a Kandinsky in a museum in Eindhoven. It had been there since 1951. Could it be the one in the Potsdam house? The curators looked again and found the word “Landschaft” crossed out on the back of the painting. It was the same term that Siegert had used to register Kandinsky in his will, and the handwriting was quite consistent with his own. Dolly died before the discovery could be confirmed, but she knew her family was on the trail of the lost masterpiece. An important discovery was a postcard with the painting, sent by the wife of an art dealer to a friend in 1966. On the card, she wrote: “This was our Kandinsky”. It was known that her husband was involved in the purchase of works of art by Johanna Margarete during the war. After a long campaign, the Murnau mit Kirche II has finally been returned to the family – and will be sold at Sotheby’s auction house in London next month. Profits will be divided among the Sterns’ 13 living heirs and will go towards further research into the fate of their lost paintings. Kandinsky created Murnau mit Kirche II after visiting the village of Murnau in the Bavarian mountains in 1908. It is a highly significant work for art history, going back to what the Russian had absorbed from Cézanne and Van Gogh in Paris, but it also prospects the influence he would have on Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others in New York. “It’s a very, very special image, one of Kandinsky’s greatest. It comes from a period when he was making a breakthrough in abstraction that would have a major impact on 20th-century art,” explains Helena Newman of Sotheby’s. Most of Kandinsky’s early paintings are already in museum collections — and it’s rare that one as special as this one makes it to market. Art historians say that the painter had the condition, or gift, of synesthesia: he was able to look at a color and listen to music. It seems fitting that his vivid lost masterpiece is linked to the story of a little girl who found joy in the everyday music of footsteps on liberated streets. Dolly’s family did not want to use her last name in this article because they want to protect her identity. Murnau mit Kirche II, by Wassily Kandinsky, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s, London, on March 1st. Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster. – This article was originally published in

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