The Gestapo took the Ephrussi palace in Vienna in 1938; the family says a maid hid the netsuke in her mattress, and the Jewish Museum says it cannot be proved

The Paris collector Charles Ephrussi (1849 to 1905) bought Japanese netsuke, small carved toggles, in the 1870s. In 1899 he gave them as a wedding present to his Vienna cousin Viktor (1860 to 1945), who married Emmy Schey von Koromla. The netsuke stood in a glass cabinet in Emmy's dressing room in the Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse. After Austria was annexed in March 1938, the Gestapo seized the collection with all the family's assets, and the palace was aryanised. The family fled to Britain, the United States and Mexico, impoverished and stateless. Emmy died in 1938. Viktor died in exile in 1945. The family story is that the maid, Anna, hid netsuke in her mattress while the Nazis catalogued the house, and gave them back after the war. In 2010 Viktor's great-grandson Edmund de Waal told that story in The Hare with Amber Eyes. The Jewish Museum Vienna says it cannot be proved. The netsuke are not named on the Gestapo confiscation lists. They reappear in 1950, in an export permit for Viktor's son Iggie: 60 wood and 135 ivory pieces, restituted by the Republic of Austria and sent to Tokyo. Iggie died in 1994 and left them to de Waal. In 2018 de Waal lent the collection to the Jewish Museum Vienna and sold 79 netsuke at auction for the Refugee Council. Since April 2023 they have been on show in the museum's permanent exhibition.