Lost and Sometimes Found:
Suzanne Loebl’s Encounter with Nazi-Plundered Art
and Its Sometime Restitution
Suzanne Loebl in Conversation with Ori Z Soltes
August 12, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
| FreeBorn in Germany, Suzanne Loebl and her family were intuitive enough to leave for Belgium in 1938, and lucky enough to be hidden there after the Nazis overran the country. She survived to carve out a diverse career as a writer, including books that focus on the visual arts and museums. Her most recent volume, Plunder and Survival, draws from her passion for art and her fascination with the story of both the Nazi obsession and theft of cultural property and the winding trajectory of attempts to restore plundered artworks to the families or institutions from which they were stolen. In this zoom program Loebl will engage in a dialogue with Ori Z Soltes, Co-Founder and Chair of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. The discussion will offer a dynamic interweave of personal anecdote and ideas of universal consequence, mediated by unique visual images.
Image above: Yussuf Abbo, sketch of Gretel Bamberger, Suzanne’s mother, n.d. Courtesy Suzanne Loebl
Suzanne Loebl (née Bamberger) was born in Germany into an art-collecting family. The family took refuge in Belgium in 1938. As a teen, she survived the Holocaust in Brussels, working as a nursery maid. After World War II, she began studying chemistry. She continued her studies at Columbia University after the family relocated to New York in 1946. After working as a research assistant, she returned to Columbia on a Sloan Science Writing Fellowship.
Loebl’s expertise, interests and her unusual life have inspired 15 books, including several young adult books, a 1000+ page Drug Handbook for nurses, medical self-help books and a memoir, At the Mercy of Strangers: Growing up on the Edge of the Holocaust. Her latest book; Plunder and Survival: Stories of Theft, Loss, Recovery and Migration of Nazi-Uprooted Art, provides factual information, an eyewitness account, and novel anecdotes.
Ori Z Soltes teaches at Georgetown University. He is the former director and curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum and the author of a multitude of books and articles, including The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust. He co-founded The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art.
This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”
The book Plunder and Survival. Stories of Theft, Loss, Recovery, and Migration of Nazi Uprooted Art was written by Suzanne Loebl and Abigail Wilentz and was published by Bloomsbury Press. It can be ordered here:
