Sam Bernhard Levie was born in Groningen, Holland, on 6 April 1887 as one of the seven children of David (1843–1889) and Jansje Levie (née Drilsma, 1852–1933). His family was Jewish. In 1916, he established the textile trading company of R. de Metz & Co. in Rotterdam, in partnership with Leeuwarden-born Rudolph de Metz, and later settled in Amsterdam in around 1924. He married Sara (née de Zwarte, 1899–1943) there on 5 July 1933.
As the textile business grew before the invasion of Holland, Levie built up an extensive collection of Dutch and Italian Old Masters, including works by Adam Willaerts, Abraham van Beijeren, Balthasar van der Ast, Frans de Momper, Leonard Bramer, Orazio Borgianni, the Studio of Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde and Luca Cambiaso. As the increasingly virulent antisemitic measures put in place by the Germans after the invasion of May 1940 began to oppress the Dutch Jewish community ever more acutely, Levie was forced to sell off his art collection piece by piece in order to survive, having lost his financial security as a result of the persecutory measures.
Among the many works that Levie had to sell was a Studio of Berckheyde composition, A view of the Dam with the new Town Hall, the Nieuwe Kerk and the Waag, Amsterdam [Fig. 2], that he sent on commission to the Amsterdam gallery of D.A. Hoogendijk & Co. and that was later purchased from him by Hoogendijk on 15 September 1940 for NLG 8,000 four months after the occupation. Another was a landscape by Adam Willaerts, Fishermen bringing in the catch, elegant figures purchasing fish on the bank and numerous other figures, a fortified town beyond [Fig. 3], that Levie sold on 12 or 13 September 1940 via the Gebroeders Douwes gallery at Rokin 46 in Amsterdam to the notorious Berlin-based Nazi art agent Walter Andreas Hofer, who bought art on behalf of Hermann Göring.
Sam and Sara Levie were deported to the Kamp Vught concentration camp near the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch in late 1942 and later transferred to Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where they were murdered on 28 May 1943. Three of Levie’s surviving siblings — his brothers Leonard, Isidor, and David — were also murdered in Sobibor and Auschwitz.
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The story of the Levies, of whom there is no known surviving photograph, intersects in a profoundly moving way with that of the Heppner-Krämers. These two Jewish couples — the former Dutch and the latter German, who had moved to Holland at the end of March 1933 shortly after Hitler had come to power — met through the agency of chance and a mutual love of art, and their histories are inextricably linked.
Dr Albert Heppner (1900–1945) was an art historian, art dealer and collector originally from Berlin. While leading an art appreciation tour at the Rijksmuseum, he met another couple, the Levies, there with his Bavaria-born wife Irene Marianne Heppner-Krämer (1904–1997). Albert Heppner and Sam Levie discovered that they shared a great love of art and a friendship blossomed between the two men and their wives, only to be brutally ended by the deportation of the Levies in 1942 and the Heppner-Krämers going into hiding that same year.
Levie and his wife had no children, so when Levie drew up his will with an Amsterdam notary in 1940, he left his estate to Albert Heppner, seemingly without Heppner’s knowledge. Heppner fled Amsterdam with his wife and their son Max in August 1942 after a German raid on their apartment and as the threat of persecution grew more acute by the day. They first found temporary shelter in the village of Kockengen in the province of Utrecht but eventually went into hiding for the rest of the occupation with another Jewish family on a farm in Zeilberg, North Brabant in the farmer’s chicken shed. The great kindness and bravery of the farmer and his family, the Janssens, undoubtedly saved the Heppner-Krämers’ lives.
Albert Heppner died of sudden-onset liver failure almost immediately after liberation in 1945 without ever having become aware of his place in Levie’s will or having asserted his rights to Levie’s estate. It was not until 1950 that Irene learned of Levie’s will when she visited her notary in Amsterdam who, completely coincidentally, was the very same one who had registered Levie’s will in 1940. It is possible that Irene was aware of the forced sales of Levie’s paintings in the early years of the occupation, but if she was she did not live long enough to claim her rights to them, dying a year before the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. Those rights passed instead down to Max, who was born in Holland on 15 October 1933. Max Heppner is an author now living in the United States whose books include I Live in a Chickenhouse, a remarkable memoir about his years spent in hiding with his parents on the Janssens’ farm. Heppner used as illustrations for this memoir the drawings that he had made while living in the chicken shed.
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The story of the Levies, of whom there is no known surviving photograph, intersects in a profoundly moving way with that of the Heppner-Krämers. These two Jewish couples — the former Dutch and the latter German, who had moved to Holland at the end of March 1933 shortly after Hitler had come to power — met through the agency of chance and a mutual love of art, and their histories are inextricably linked.
Dr Albert Heppner (1900–1945) was an art historian, art dealer and collector originally from Berlin. While leading an art appreciation tour at the Rijksmuseum, he met another couple, the Levies, there with his Bavaria-born wife Irene Marianne Heppner-Krämer (1904–1997). Albert Heppner and Sam Levie discovered that they shared a great love of art and a friendship blossomed between the two men and their wives, only to be brutally ended by the deportation of the Levies in 1942 and the Heppner-Krämers going into hiding that same year.
Levie and his wife had no children, so when Levie drew up his will with an Amsterdam notary in 1940, he left his estate to Albert Heppner, seemingly without Heppner’s knowledge. Heppner fled Amsterdam with his wife and their son Max in August 1942 after a German raid on their apartment and as the threat of persecution grew more acute by the day. They first found temporary shelter in the village of Kockengen in the province of Utrecht but eventually went into hiding for the rest of the occupation with another Jewish family on a farm in Zeilberg, North Brabant in the farmer’s chicken shed. The great kindness and bravery of the farmer and his family, the Janssens, undoubtedly saved the Heppner-Krämers’ lives.
Albert Heppner died of sudden-onset liver failure almost immediately after liberation in 1945 without ever having become aware of his place in Levie’s will or having asserted his rights to Levie’s estate. It was not until 1950 that Irene learned of Levie’s will when she visited her notary in Amsterdam who, completely coincidentally, was the very same one who had registered Levie’s will in 1940. It is possible that Irene was aware of the forced sales of Levie’s paintings in the early years of the occupation, but if she was she did not live long enough to claim her rights to them, dying a year before the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets. Those rights passed instead down to Max, who was born in Holland on 15 October 1933. Max Heppner is an author now living in the United States whose books include I Live in a Chickenhouse, a remarkable memoir about his years spent in hiding with his parents on the Janssens’ farm. Heppner used as illustrations for this memoir the drawings that he had made while living in the chicken shed.
‘The Nazis didn’t care whether we were good neighbours. They killed most of the Jews in Holland, including many children like me. You could say I was lucky that they left me in my bed when they raided my home. I was also lucky because, after locking Mother up for a couple of days, they let her go. Father hid in the attic during the raid and didn’t get caught. When the three of us were back together, we decided to escape from Amsterdam, the city we lived in.’
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'Each restitution is important in bringing some degree of justice to those families who were despoiled of their property during the Holocaust. In this instance it is even more special as Mr. Levie’s heir is a Holocaust survivor himself and actively teaches students in the United States about this historic period.'
In 2014, the Dutch Restitutiecommissie (Dutch Restitutions Committee) recommended the restitution to Max Heppner of two of Levie’s old master paintings that had been held as part of the Netherlands Art Property Collection in the custody of the Dutch state since they were recuperated by the Allies after the end of World War II. One was A view of the Dam with the new Town Hall, the Nieuwe Kerk and the Waag, Amsterdam by the Studio of Gerrit Berckheyde (inv. no. NK 1978), which after its restitution was sold at Christie’s London on 9 December 2015:
and the other was Fishermen bringing in the catch, elegant figures purchasing fish on the bank and numerous other figures, a fortified town beyond by Willaerts (inv. no. NK 2729), which was sold at Christie’s Amsterdam on 26 November 2014 after its restitution:
By 2022, only these two paintings had been recovered on behalf of Max Heppner with the support of Mondex Corporation in Canada, which is still actively looking for Levie’s other missing works. In the autumn of 2022 Christie’s Restitution department identified a third Levie painting during its pre-sale review ahead of the Old Master Paintings auction in Paris. In the spirit of the 1998 Washington Principles and the ‘just and fair solution’ provision of Clause 8 of those Principles, Christie’s Restitution worked with the then-owner of the painting and with Mondex to reach a settlement that allowed Vanitas With An Hourglass And Skull by Peeter Sion to remain in the sale. It sold successfully, benefitting both the consignor and Max Heppner, and the unresolved Nazi-era taint attached to the work for more than 80 years was thus lifted.
tbc
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