"We will never accept wartime looting as a permanent state of affairs", Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska told Polish Press Agency (PAP), adding that despite numerous successes, the work remains far from over.
The effort is led by a multidisciplinary team at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage combining art historians, archivists, lawyers, digital technology specialists and field operatives handling inspections, negotiations and logistics. Elżbieta Rogowska, deputy director of the ministry's Cultural Heritage Department, described the work as a blend of chess, thriller and painstaking bureaucratic research — with no room for routine.
Artificial intelligence has transformed the team's reach. "Thanks to new technologies, we are seeing an avalanche increase in objects to verify", Rogowska said, noting that most cases now originate from the team's own online searches, rather than from external tips as was the case years ago.
The ministry prefers negotiation over litigation. "There are many paths to recovering objects — from legal to negotiation. We prefer dialogue", Rogowska said. State buybacks are ruled out on both ethical and legal grounds; most objects, regardless of how many times they have changed hands, remain legally the property of the Polish state.
Among the more striking recoveries is a painting by Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt, found rolled up in an attic near Łódź. It was not listed in Poland's wartime losses database, but six months of research confirmed it had hung in the presidential residence at Spała before the war. Another recovered work — "Summer" by Bertha Wegmann, now in the National Museum in Wrocław — was restituted from Denmark without a single pre-war photograph, relying solely on a precise description in a pre-war museum catalogue.
Last year's return from Germany of 73 Teutonic Order documents dating back centuries — the result of efforts begun in the 1940s and resumed in the 1990s — was described by Rogowska as Poland's greatest restitution success since 1990.
Russia poses the most intractable challenge, holding a vast number of works taken from Polish territory after the war. Poland has submitted 20 diplomatic restitution requests covering tens of thousands of artefacts, with no prospect of talks. South America and the Far East are described as largely uncharted territory.
Rogowska believes Raphael's missing portrait, Poland's most-wanted wartime loss, will eventually surface. "The work is so iconic it cannot be legally sold or even hung on a wall", she said.
(jh)
Source: PAP