Gottfried Messmer, owner of a bar in Zurich, receives an unexpected inheritance, one of those Swiss bank boxes that can contain a fortune as well as a souvenir. In Gottfried’s box there is only a cane, but it is not the nothing it seems, because inside it is rolled up a painting by Gustav Klimt of great value.
This is how El bosque en silencio begins, an exciting thriller by Mónica Subietas (Barcelona, ??1971) in which the author travels from the present to the Switzerland of 1942 and immerses herself in the exciting history of art that the Nazis stole from the Jews and that still remains today. has not yet been located.
“Although there is no exact data, it is estimated that the Jews have recovered a third of the art that the Nazis took from them, the rest is in museums, in private collections or still disappeared. It is not known where. In 1998, the Washington Principles were signed and it was agreed that when it was shown that a work had been looted, it would be returned to its rightful owners. But these pacts have only been signed by 44 countries and they are not binding,” explains Subietas in an interview with La Vanguardia.
The Barcelona writer and journalist met a Swiss boy 15 years ago in the Zurich bar in Barcelona. She fell in love, got married and ended up living precisely in Zurich. Subietas was already writing, but one day he had access to the Hergé report, a very complete study that explains the role of neutral Switzerland during World War II: “There were a lot of topics that were pure gold, but when I found out about that information, it no longer It was current and it was useless to publish it in the press, I looked for a way to make it known without limit of words and being able to address various edges of the subject, that’s how this novel arose”.
A book that also tells the story of the so-called couriers, “people who risked their lives to help Jews cross the German or Austrian border and reach neutral ground.” “When the war started, Switzerland took in many Jews, but in 1942 it decided to close the borders. Some 300,000 refugees had settled in a country with a population of four million, and tension in Switzerland, which was suffering from food rationing due to the conflict, was growing”, the author relates. But not all Swiss citizens were satisfied with this situation: “The postal service helped Jews fleeing from the Nazis out of sheer humanity.” However, “they acted against the government decision, so if they were caught, they were socially isolated and even prosecuted.”
Gottfried Messmer’s father was one of those couriers. On one occasion he helped a Jew who hid in his cane the only valuable asset he had been able to keep: Waldinner is a landscape that Klimt painted in 1881. The painting is as mysterious as the plot of El bosque en silencio, which Subietas wrote in Spanish. , but which was initially published in German for readers in Germany and Austria.
“It is not known where that work is. The information about it is very confusing, it could have been exposed on some occasion, but it has not been confirmed, it is believed that an attempt was made to sell at Christie’s in 2006 or 2008, but it was not in the auction results…” . Waldinneres is part of history, of the mystery of the art stolen by the Nazis that still exists.
