“There was a famous hunter of war criminals who was very active then. He combed South America for important Nazis, with great success. It was roughly thirty-five years after the war by then, and they were still looking for Nazis from the High Command. Many were still in hiding. Some had covered their tracks well and were living out in the open. I had heard of it, but never paid any attention. It had nothing to do with my life or my father’s. Until the hunter in question found my father.
“The man’s skills were extraordinary. He had been looking for Papa for years but had had misleading information. Once he realized he had found my father, everything happened very quickly. My father didn’t die suddenly, he was kidnapped, taken back to Germany, where he was charged with heinous war crimes, and stood trial. The testimony against him was horrendous. I read it all,” she said, with tears still welling up in her eyes. It was hard to admit this to him now, but she thought he should know. “He was tried and found guilty. He was sentenced to hang, but they commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He was seventy-three years old when they took him from Buenos Aires, and they took everything he owned. He had quite a lot of money, which the war crimes tribunal in Germany demanded as restitution to the victims. His art collection, our houses, everything he had, gone. It was the right thing to do, but it took away everything he had and that I would have inherited one day. I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway, once I knew how he got it, but it changed everything for me.
“Once my father was convicted, your father’s family demanded that he separate from me. We’d been married for ten years and had four-month-old twins. I begged him not to leave. It was an ugly time. He was a good person, but he was close to his family, and he saw me differently after what happened. I’m not sure he believed that I hadn’t known about my father’s past because we were so close, and apparently he thought I’d hidden it from him. I think he felt terrible about it, but he followed his family’s wishes, and he left me very quickly. The governor and a judge they knew granted him a divorce almost immediately. They gave me a small amount of money to live on for a short time, until I could find a job, and for you. And according to his family’s demands, your father renounced all rights to you and Javier. They wanted no connection to the bloodline of a criminal. He refused to see me or speak to me after he left, and he never saw you and Javier again.” Joachim stopped her then, with a look of shock and horror on his face as he grabbed her arm.
“Wait, are you telling me that during all those years you told us our father was dead, he was alive?” The idea that their mother, whom they trusted implicitly, had lied to them about something so important was an additional shock.
She shook her head in answer to his question. “By the time you asked me about him, he was dead. He remarried almost immediately after the divorce, a very young, very beautiful socialite. He died in a polo accident three years later. They had ordered me to take back my maiden name of von Hartmann after the divorce. They denied you and Javier the use of their name too. They wanted nothing to do with any of us. So, I changed yours and your brother’s as well. You were both three years old when he died. We never saw him again from the day he left. And I was ordered to leave our home within weeks, with both of you. They considered me the daughter of a monster, and a criminal myself by association. Your father and his family wanted nothing to do with any of us after that, no intermingling with their pure bloodline. I never heard from any of them again. Your father never saw you or Javier after he left us when you were four months old.
“I would have gone to see my father in Germany, but I never had the money. I wanted to see him at least once so he could explain everything to me himself. We wrote to each other several times. I moved from our big house to a tiny apartment. I got the job I had at the museum. They were aware of the scandal, but they knew that I was desperate and had two babies to support. And unlike my in-laws, they didn’t blame me for my father’s crimes. They were very kind to me. I was heartbroken over my father and what he had done. I never saw him again. He died in prison in Germany. And then, all those years later, fifteen to be exact, Francois and I met, and two years later, I married him and we came to Paris.
“Francois knew the whole story. I told him. I would never have kept it from him. He got me the job at the Louvre, and once I was there I discovered the organization I work for now. When I realized what they did I begged them to hire me, and they did. It is my way of paying penance for my father’s sins. He took much more than paintings from the people he robbed and sent to their deaths. But with each painting I can find and restore to its rightful owners, I am doing some small thing to restore dignity to them, and justice, and often even money that they need. I can’t bring their relatives back, but if I can find their art for them, that’s something.”