Le front de l'art

the long version

This is the autobiography of Rose Valland, heroine of the French resistance and of human art during the Nazi occupation of Paris. The ERR, the Nazi unit in charge of stealing works of art, chose the Jeu de Paume as repository for the art works taken from Jewish collectors, artists, and art merchants, eventually accumulating around 20,000 works. Using her secret but good command of German and her prodigious memory, Rose spied daily on the works that came in, the owners they had been stolen from, and (if they were sent elsewhere) their disposition. She entered all these bits of information by hand into her secret notebooks, which, at the end of the war, proved invaluable for tracing thousands of pieces of art so that they could be returned to the families of the rightful owners. She was highly decorated in France, and received the US Medal of Freedom in 1951.