He probably deposited the rest of the collection with his friend, Edmund Mętlewicz, who, on his orders, sold the canvases in the Warsaw antique shops "Skarbiec" and "Miniatura", and transferred the money to the ghetto.
The circumstances of the crime are described by, among others, Dr. Zbigniew Lewicki, who, on the day after the tragedy, went to the ghetto to look for Prof. Raszeja after he had failed to return from his pass, and by Władysław Szpilman, who, in his memoirs published after the war,[5] states that A. Gutnajer was shot under anesthesia on the operating table.
According to Marek Edelman, this crime, as well as others carried out on 21 July 1942, were intended to intimidate the ghetto population so that it would not put up resistance during the displacement action planned for the following day.
[6] The bodies of the victims of the murder on 26 Chlodna St. were quickly buried in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa St. in Warsaw's Wola district.
He fought in the September campaign against both the Germans and the Soviets, then as a soldier of the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade he participated in the Battle of Tobruk in 1941, and then as a bombardier he took part in RAF combat flights over Germany.
[8] In his "Chronicles of the week", Antoni Słonimski used a word he created himself, "abergutnajerism", to describe his preoccupation with past times in reference to Abe Gutnajer's interest in 19th century painting.
In March 2006, Pieter de Grebber's "Portrait of a Reading Man," stolen from Gutnajer's apartment in the ghetto, was found in the registry and catalog entitled "Wartime Losses.
[10] After negotiations led by professor Wojciech Kowalski, who is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs plenipotentiary for the Restitution of Plundered and Displaced Cultural Property, it was agreed that the profit from the sale of the painting would be divided equally between the Latvian seller and the heirs of Abe Gutnajer, his daughter-in-law Eve Gutnajer-Infanti and grandchildren Stefan and Krystyna.