Deborah Lipstadt: Boston's Musuem of Fine Arts ... A Horrible Comparison

[Ms. Lipstadt is Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.]

Geoff Edgers, writing in The Boston Globe, reports that Boston's Museum of Fine Arts [MFA] and an Australian woman are in court fighting over a painting which belonged to her family. The painting was sold by the woman's uncle in Vienna in 1939 and eventually was acquired by the museum.

The woman claims it was sold under duress. The MFA, which apparently has done extensive research on this, disputes that and says it was a normal transaction.

But here's what caught my attention in The Boston Globe article. The Deputy Director of the Museum, Katherine Getchell, made the following absurd statement when she claimed that the sale of the picture was a matter of business as usual:

"Would you also say that people who sold things [during] the Depression, yes, they sold them under duress?" she said."Yes, if somebody sells their house now because they can't meet their high mortgage payment, is that a forced sale of a house? I think it's very dangerous to make the supposition that everything that happened during a period of time was forced." [The Boston Globe ]

I have no idea of the details of the sale, but let's reflect on the situation in Vienna in 1939. The Nazis had arrived the previous year.The Austrians had greeted them enthusiastically. Jews were treated with greater brutality than in Germany.

Jews were forced to use toothbrushes to clean anti-Nazi slogans that had been painted on the street.There are chilling pictures showing terrified people on their hands and knees doing such cleaning while gleeful Austrians stand and cheer. In some of these pictures is that it is young kids who are forcing the Jews to do this. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide.

Eichmann had been dispatched to Vienna to create a “conveyor belt” [his term] to move Jews out. In a short time 128,000 Jews would leave.

Jews were well aware of the pressure to get out. The situation was working so efficiently that Eichmann forced the leaders of the Berlin Jewish community to come to Vienna to see how efficiently the Jews were being forced to move out of the Reich.

Remember, this was before the Germans had settled on a plan to murder the Jews and were “just” trying to get them to emigrate. Their objective was to have them leave quickly and with no material goods. Their possessions would all fall into German hands. In short they were to be pauperized.

Sometimes the sale of goods was to other Jews. Not everything was openly confiscated by the Germans. Rest assured, it ultimately all fell into the hands of German governmental agencies or well placed Nazis.

Every memoir, history book, and biography talks of the terror under which Austrian Jews lived during those days. They knew get out or eventually end up in concentration camps.

To compare this to someone selling their house during the depression is absurd. It would be akin to saying that"not every young Black slave girl who had sexual relations with her master or a member of his family was forced into it. Some may truly have been in love." This was a relationship of the all powerful to the powerless. To see it as anything else is just plain stupid or, more properly put, obtuse and could only be made by someone who does not understand the nature of slavery.

So too with the situation of Jews in Vienna. Jews were seeking every which way to get out. For Jews nothing that happened in Vienna at the time was “normal.”

I would suggest that MFA Deputy Director Getchell learn a bit more about history before she makes any more such far fetched, if not, absurd analogies.