When they returned to the apartment after the end of WWII, they discovered a receipt from the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, a Nazi looting organization, for a painting by Marc Chagall called variously L'Echelle de Jacob or Le Paysan et l'Echelle or The Peasant and the Ladder or Jacob's Ladder that the Nazis had seized.

She found a mention of the Chagall in a catalog in 1962 and contacted the possessor, the American art collector Albert A.

[3] List, who said he had bought the painting from Perls Galleries in New York in 1955 and was unaware of its history,[4] refused to return it.

Perls, a refugee from the Nazis, and a former head of the Art Dealers' Association of America, also said he did not know that Chagall had been looted.

[5][6] The restitution claim was the first of its kind in the United States and as such gained considerable legal and media attention.