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Holiday 2014 / 2015 Tempus-Magazine.com 82 with Hitler's ambitions for a Nazi Europe becoming ominously more apparent, a Dutch curator named Willem Sandberg determined that something must be done to safeguard the priceless treasures at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He persuaded his superiors to build a vault for the Rembrandts and Vermeers—in the sand dunes near Castricum, about thirty kilometers from the city. As the threat of a German invasion became reality, art was frst loaded onto barges anchored in canals and then, three weeks before the Germans marched in, stashed in the underground depot, where it was ostensibly pro- tected not just from the indiscriminate destruction that accompanies warfare but from Nazi plundering. Te art housed in the dunes, however, came not only from the Stedelijk's walls but also from Jewish collectors and artists, who entrusted their prized possessions with Sandberg before feeing the coun- try, going into hiding, or being arrested and sent to concentration camps. With the Anschluss in Aus- tria and the German invasion of Poland, the Nazis had seized Judaica, melted down silver, and stolen P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y J O H . D E H A A S , C O L L E C T I O N S T E D E L I J K M U S E U M A M S T E R D A M priceless art from Jews. Aware that Jewish property in the Netherlands was also at risk of confscation, Sandberg sometimes marked his inventory with just a collector's initial or "often hid or got rid of little notes—'Tis Matisse was from this person,'" says Margriet Schavemaker, a curator at the Stedelijk. "After a couple of months, the Germans knew [the vault] was there. Tey came to look at what was there." Whether out of arrogance—they thought they had plenty of time to mine its riches—or prag- matism, since the war was still raging, the Germans left the vault's contents untouched. By the time the war ended in 1945, many of the artworks' rightful owners had perished. During the occupation and in the postwar years, other paint- ings, sculptures, and drawings entered the Ste- delijk's collection—and that of virtually every other museum around the world—through question- able transactions, some of them with large gaps in provenance, others with documents that had been forged, and still others that had come to market via forced sales. Te museum was left with some real gems—and a muddle. Just what belonged to whom was often murky. Now, after more than a decade of exhaustive re- search into the provenance of 3,846 objects in its collection—each and every piece made before 1945 and acquired after 1933, the year Hitler came to power—the Stedelijk is mounting an exhibition that examines its own role in World War II. Stedelijk in the War, which runs from February 21 through May 31, will present a far more complex picture of the renowned institution than was previously known. With about forty artworks as well as archival mate- rial and individual accounts of the pieces' owners and their fates, the show will shift the focus from creators to collectors, and from art as object to art as both property and powerful symbol of suffering and justice. "Tis exhibition can show this whole context," says Schavemaker, who helmed the muse- um's research project and is organizing the exhibit. "We show the biography of the painting." In many ways, the story revolves around Sand- berg. A member of the Dutch resistance, Sandberg was also an accomplished graphic designer, and he used his skills to forge papers for Jews and others in danger. When the occupying Germans began to cross-check papers with ofcial documents from the municipal registry in hopes of identifying Jews, Sandberg and others in the resistance, including many artists, plotted to bomb the public records building in 1943. Tey destroyed thousands of docu- H I D I N G P L A C E Entrance of the art storage bunker near Castricum. A R T S AV I O U R Museum curator Willem Sandberg is credited with saving valuable collections of art by persuading his superiors to build a huge bunker in the dunes near Castricum.