Hector Feliciano leads the way down the staircase of the Pompidou Center with all the glee of an inspector about to nab his most wanted suspect.
He rushes ahead to the modern art museum's exhibit of 39 paintings recovered from the Nazis after World War II. Then he lights briefly in front of an early cubist piece by Fernand Leger. "Look," he says, pointing his finger excitedly in an "Aha" moment.This was one of the "decadent" works of art that the Nazis looted. About 2,000 such stolen pieces have spent the past half-century in museums that crown this city.
Until this year, few who saw the artworks in the Pompidou or Louvre or the d'Orsay knew their history. Those who did know assumed that the owners and heirs had disappeared - victims of the Holocaust.
But the Puerto Rican-born author of "The Lost Museum" did what French officials hadn't done: He went searching hard for the heirs. And found many. The Leger, he says, delightedly, belongs to the Rosenberg family in America. As for the Picasso and the Gleizes? "I found the owner in less than half a day!" The search is still on, across continents and Web sites.
This is more than a hide-and-seek investigation. Such revelations led recently to this abashed and embarrassed exhibit of looted works taken from Jews and held under dubious circumstances by museums. It led as well to sidewalk cafe conversation about the halfhearted search for rightful owners.
My museum visit is just one stop on a map of post-Holocaust stories. This spring, in enough places to fill a grim guidebook, Europe is revisiting and excavating World War II cover-ups and postwar complicities that are even more startling than these stolen masterpieces.
Not far from the Pompidou in the old Jewish section called the Marais, the French are debating just how "helpful" the wartime government was in seizing Jewish property. And how moral the postwar government was in holding onto it.
Meanwhile, over the border, the famed Swiss "neutrality" has taken on a darker hue with claims that bankers concealed the assets of Holocaust victims and may owe heirs as much as $7 billion.
In Austria, too, a lawsuit charges that seven of Europe's top insurance companies stole more billions, refusing to honor the policies of Holocaust families. And in Germany itself, the prestigious Democracy Prize went to Daniel Goldhagen, whose book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," focuses not on Nazi leaders but on murderous everyday choices of everyday Germans.
This is not merely a coincidence but a chain reaction of postwar post-mortems. A full half-century after the war, the tale of the Nazi years is still, as Hector Feliciano says, "like the French pastry, a mille-feuille, you keep peeling one layer and there is another."
Why are the layers being peeled now? For long silent years, survivors of the Holocaust focused on just that: survival. In the late '70s there was a reawakening of memorials and oral histories, and Schindler's lists. The 50th anniversary and its somber celebration released memories along with the recognition that time was running out for the aged survivors.
But it isn't just surviving Jews and heirs pressing for belated tokens of justice, the small spoils of an overwhelming evil. It is whole European nations as well. As Gold-hagen explains the reaction in its simplest terms, "Time has passed and too many secrets have been kept. We have to face this."
Indeed, time has passed. European leaders, like French President Chirac at 64, are less invested in the myth that their people were either divided into a handful of collaborators or a mass of resisters. A young generation has grown to adulthood far removed from the war of their grandparents.
At the same time, Europeans are sobered by the recognition that both "ethnic cleansing" and silent collaboration had reappeared right on their doorstep in Bosnia.
A recovered painting, an ancient insurance policy, a piece of gold? These are all small rights balanced against the overwhelming wrongs of the Nazi era. But here they have become symbolic acts.
Europeans are dealing with the reality that there were as many shades of complicity as there are cubist facets in an early Leger.
Boston Globe Newspaper Co.