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The daughter of David Friedmann, a Czech Jewish painter who survived the Holocaust after spending the war years in death camps, has been staging a longstanding battle to preserve the memory of her father and try to recover some 2,000 works that disappeared after his arrest by the Nazis.

After devoting most of her life in trying to find the whereabouts of these works, Miriam Friedman Morris would surely deserve to be praised for her unrelenting quest provided her actions had been relevant as she has taken the strange habit of claiming that all the pieces likely to emerge in various places were stolen from David Friedmann's studio in Prague.

For instance, after discovering in 2003 an article published in 2001 on the artcult.website relating how I found a painting of two nude women signed by her father, she contacted me to hail such finding as "exciting" and then offered to provide his full biography  plus some photos if I wished to include them in the second edition of the dictionary titled "Around Jewish Art" that I had just published.

At no time did she suggest that this painting might have been stolen from her father when he was arrested in 1941 even though I did not know its provenance after finding it at an antique fair outside Paris. It was thus impossible to determine whether it had been either sold by David Friedmann before he endured Nazi persecutions between 1933 and 1941, or plundered from his studio bar the fact that it might also have been taken to France by a Jewish refugee during the 1930s while Mrs Friedman herself reckoned in an article published on the Web that it was hard to differentiate between works sold by her father during his successful career and those that were stolen from him.

Mrs Friedman said she was determined to pursue her unrelenting quest to find her father's lost and stolen art in the belief of justice after signaling that great attention only focused on the loss and return of famous artworks and million dollar lawsuits by heirs of prosperous art collectors and dealers while lesser-known Jewish artists who were the victims of Nazi persecutions had been most of the time ignored.

Despite his obvious skills and reputation, David Friedmann's career almost came to an end as a result of the Nazi persecutions he endured. Whereas he had usually sold up to 80 works a year before 1933 he then met hard times as he was only allowed to offer his works to Jewish buyers from that year.

Born in Ostrava in 1893, David Friedmann moved in 1911 to Berlin where he became a student of Lovis Corinth and Herman Struck. In 1914, he established a studio in Berlin where he created portraits, nudes and still lifes and then volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army three years later to serve as a battlefield artist before resuming his career after the war.

Much concerned with the fate of his Jewish likes victims of pogroms in Eastern Europe he notably described their plight in several drawings or etchings and also produced hundreds of portraits of personalities such as Albert Einstein, Szymon Goldberg, Yehudi Menuhin, Max Brod or Arnold Schönberg before the Nazis rose to power in 1933. As a result he was forced to close his studio and to seek refuge in Prague with his wife Mathilde and infant daughter Mirjam Helene in 1938.

Arrested in 1941 David Friedmann was first sent to the Lodz ghetto and later transferred to Auschwitz and other concentration camps while his wife and daughter were murdered by the Nazis. He miraculously survived the Holocaust and returned to Prague where he married Hildegarde Taussig, a fellow survivor. After Czechoslovakia fell under Communist rule, he settled in Israel where Miriam was born before he decided to emigrate to the U.S in 1954.

Denied the opportunity of becoming a renowned artist because of what the Nazis made him suffer, David Friedmann spent most of the rest of his life fighting for compensation and lamenting over the fate of the works that had vanished after his arrest to such an extent that his daughter, infused by his permanent obsession, felt compelled to take up his fight and embark in a frantic search for his lost works.

I had no news from Miriam Friedman after September 2009 when she sent me a message on my Facebook account recalling our previous exchanges of 2003 about the painting I had found in 2001 before I decided to sell it at a Paris auction due to be held on May 14, 2014.

The day before the sale, I was stunned to learn from the auctioneer that Miriam Friedman had instructed her legal advisers in Paris to stop the sale of that painting on the motive that it had been plundered by the Nazis from her father's studio.

While I felt extremely baffled and hurt by her initiative, she brought no tangible proof whatsoever to support such assertion. All the more, in pretending that any piece of art produced by her father should be considered as stolen she has raised an unprecedented legal issue regarding discovered works by other Jewish artists victims of the Holocaust to suggest that they could also be classified as plundered on the simple basis of a suspicion of theft.

Considering myself as a specialist regarding Nazi spoliations, I obviously support the claims of those heirs who have been trying to recover works either sold under duress by their relatives or stolen from them between 1933 and 1945 however only on condition that they can prove their demands.

Many decades elapsed before the question of works stolen from many Holocaust victims could be raised at international level. After the war, the priority was essentially given to those European museums plundered by the Nazis while individual requests were often ignored. For instance, thousands of works recovered by the Allied forces were deposited in French museums while little efforts were made to identify their legal owners during over 45 years.

Things changed during the past decade in France when the French Culture ministry launched a program to speed up restitutions while numerous heirs of Holocaust victims had already been battling hard in this country or elsewhere to obtain the return of stolen works.

The resilience shown by some museums regarding numerous claims was really disturbing. As an example, the Pompidou Museum in Paris which had acquired a Georges Braque painting titled "The Man with a Guitar" owned by Alphonse Kann, a Jewish collector who had sought refuge in London in 1940, refused to meet the demands made by his heirs in pretending that this work had never belonged to the latter.

Luckily, I found an auction catalogue of the Lefevre collection sold in Paris well after the war which finally enabled the heirs of Alphonse Kann to clearly prove their claim. After some epic negotiations they finally obtained a 26 million euro compensation for that painting. Strangely enough, I received no reward for my kind assistance except for a handshake while Elisabeth Royer, who has posed as a specialist in the search of works stolen by the Nazis boasted that she had been the main instrument in solving this case.

Though being more than once successful in their attempts to get back what had been stolen from Alphonse Kann, his heirs have never managed so far to obtain the restitution of rare Medieval manuscripts worth at least 20 million USD held by the Wildenstein family, a  famous dynasty of Jewish dealers, despite establishing the evidence that they originated from his collection plundered by the Nazis.

There are in fact enormous sums at stake regarding demands often made by distant relatives of Holocaust victims and some claimants seeking the return of works worth several million USD have sometime behaved ferociously to go as far as brandishing ludicrous threats in order to obtain satisfaction thus showing that the issue of stolen works is not only a matter of justice but also of money for certain heirs and researchers eager to assist them in their quests.

Still, it would be somewhat indecent to evoke greed regarding such demands which have sometime led to nasty quarrels between claimants and alas fuelled disturbing anti-Semitic feelings while some other cases prompted mad speculations, such as for the recent spectacular recovery of over 1500 works from the Munich and Salzburg homes of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer whose close ties with the Nazis notably enabled him to acquire art works they had dubbed as "degenerate".

At first, the works seized in Gurlitt's homes were said to have been stolen to Jewish victims of the Holocaust until it was discovered that most of them had in fact been confiscated from German museums under a Third Reich decree which had never been rescinded. Finally, only some 50 works were suspected to have been stolen from Jewish collectors between 1933 and 1944.

The battle for the recovery of stolen works is nevertheless not so easy to carry out, notably in view of the lack of documents to support claims, the painstaking task of identifying legal owners and also because of the reluctance of many States to comply with restitution demands. As an example, thousands of works first stolen by the Nazis and then captured by Soviet troops during the invasion of Germany in 1945 were regarded as war compensations by Stalin's regime. These works have therefore remained unaccounted for, the Russian authorities showing strictly no will to discuss such matter while several other countries have made little efforts to return works they have kept during all these years.

It is also known that many U.S soldiers took  "souvenirs" back home while hundreds of stolen art works found their way in Switzerland during the conflict but no Swiss bank will ever accept to open its vaults for inspection.

It is also true that the question of works plundered from the studios of lesser-known Jewish artists has never been raised. In the "Around Jewish Art" dictionary published in 2003 I took at least the opportunity of paying homage to over 500 of them who perished in death camps while their works had been destroyed or plundered.

Many works produced by some of these forgotten Holocaust victims were often sold at auction in France, the rest of Europe and in the U.S but restitution demands remained quite limited in this respect because nobody could prove that they had been stolen during the war.

As a conclusion, preserving the memory of those artists who suffered Nazi persecutions is for sure a commendable gesture provided it does not turn into a crazy obsession for certain heirs when they get out of their minds in trying to seize works without being able to prove that they stolen by the Nazis.