With a pair of perky long-haired Daschunds yapping happily and a bear of a chocolate Lab loping at her side, a radiant Marei Von Saher makes her entrance, looking more like 42 than 62.

The grandmother who made international headlines by winning a David and Goliath battle with the Dutch government and forcing it to return 202 of some 1,400 Italian and Dutch old masters seized from her husband’s family by the Nazis during the Holocaust relies more on the grace of a ballet dancer than the fancy footwork of a prize fighter to make her way across the living room of her Greenwich home.

But don’t be like the Dutch government and let that alluring German accent, that Dorothy Hamill blond bob and those dazzling Do-Glo Tiffany-blue eyes distract you; this pixie packs one heck of a punch.

Her staying power – it took her nine years to bring the Dutch down – is as strong and sure as her Superwoman-steel handshake.

“Every painting that we find, it’s like a child coming home to us,” a jubilant Marei says, the brightness of her smile all but blotting out the sun, adding that although the works have not been evaluated and appraised, to her they are priceless. “It’s not about the money; it’s about justice, it’s about restoring the good name of my husband’s father, Jacques Goudstikker.”

Justice, yes. And the guts to make a stand to right a six-decade-old wrong that most people, including Marei, thought would never be rightfully resolved. Announced in February, the decision in this, the second largest restitution of Nazi-stolen art and the largest art-restitution case in the Netherlands, rocked the museum and art worlds to their foundations. The works, among the finest in the country, were retained by the Dutch government as part of its National Collection and were hung in 17 museums and other government buildings. In addition to paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Filippino Lippi, Giovanni Bellini, Isaac van Ostade, Claude Lorrain, Jan van Goyen and Jan Steen, the returned art includes the 1649 “River Landscape With a View of Herwen and Aerdt in Gelderland” by Salomon van Ruysdael, which is considered a treasure of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Marei and her daughters, 31-year-old Charlene and 33-year-old Chantal, are thrilled by the decision and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the artwork, which is due by the end of the year.

“We made history,” says Charlene, a Greenwich real estate agent who has been helping Marei with the case since the beginning. “The Nazis stole everything, then the Dutch government stole it again, then my grandmother fought for years to try to get everything back, and then she just couldn’t go on any longer with it. Sixty years from now, this is going to be something that people will read about.”

To make history, the family had to rediscover and uncover its own history, sketching in the details to see the whole picture.

The story, they found out, started in Amsterdam in 1919 when Jacques Goudstikker took over the family art gallery in Amsterdam. Through the years, he built a stellar reputation and became a prominent figure in the art world and in the city.  Just having a Goudstikker label on a painting enhanced its value. “He was a pioneer in this time,” Charlene says. “He had different ways of exhibiting his art, and he had different events that no other dealers were having. He was very international before anyone else was.”

He also attracted attention because he was Jewish, so in May 1940, when Nazi troops were advancing, the 42-year-old Goudstikker and his wife, Viennese opera singer Desi, fled with Edo, their infant son. Jacques’ escape was ill-fated: He fell in the hold of the blacked-out ship that was taking him to freedom, broke his neck and died instantly. In July of that year, Goudstikker’s mother, Emilie, terrified that she was going to be put in a concentration camp, allowed 780 of the gallery’s best 16th- and 17th-Century works by the likes of Van Dyck, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Velezquez, Titian and Tintoretto, to be sold to Nazi chief Hermann Goring for a pittance. Goring’s art dealer, Alois Miedl, bought the rest as well as Goudstikker’s home and gallery at below-market rates.

When the war ended, Desi, armed with Goudstikker’s little black book that catalogued his stock, began what became a seven-year effort to recover the art. However, the Dutch government, which recovered some 400 paintings, contended that they were legally sold and told her she would have to buy them back. She bought all she could afford – 165 – and complained to the Dutch government about the unfairness of the deal.  Desi then tried to put the past behind her, remarrying in 1951 and changing Edo’s surname to her new husband’s one -- Von Sahr.

In 1963, while on a tour of duty in Germany with the U.S. Army, Edo met the 19-year-old Marei, a German native who was a professional figure skater. He was, Marei admits shyly, “smitten.” She, however, was devoted to her career, which took her all over the world. “We always kept contact wherever I was,” she says. Nine years later, they married and moved to London, where Edo was working.

“I’m not Jewish, Marei says. “I’m not sure that Edo and his mother ever discussed this fact. I was born in 1944 and grew up in Mannheim, one of the towns bombed the most in World War II. I lived in a ruin with my mother and slept on a mattress with buckets all around to catch the water when it rained. We were fighting to survive, but it doesn’t compare to what the Jews went through.”
 By 1973, Edo had a banking career in Manhattan, and he and his young family were esconced in Greenwich.

“We knew very little of the Jacques Goudstikker story,” Marei says. “I knew my husband’s father was an art collector and a dealer. The girls knew about it because of Desi’s talking about it. But it wasn’t discussed in detail, and I didn’t know how much money they were worth because we never discussed the artists. I just knew there were old masters. It didn’t really concern me. And by the time Edo was an adult, Desi had moved back to Holland, where she spent the rest of her life. I was focusing on forming a happy family life. That was really the past. Now, many times I regret, I wish I would have asked many, many more questions of my mother-in-law. I’m so upset with myself, but I had to focus on the future.”

During that time, Marei also was very busy building a new career: She was teaching skating at the Greenwich Skating Club as well as at rinks in Darien, Stamford and Katonah, something she still does.

It wasn’t until 1997, after Desi and Edo, who had cancer -- had died – months apart in 1996 – that the Von Sahers began to color in all the blanks. It was Pieter den Hollander, a Dutch investigative reporter who ultimately wrote a book about them titled “The Goudstikker Case,” who called them out of the blue and gave them their first clue.

“I always knew there were 1,300 to 1,400 paintings,” Charlene says. “But we didn’t realize the depth. And what we really didn’t realize was that my grandmother was not treated fairly after the war and that’s why to this day we don’t have the 1,400 paintings. Pieter said to us, ‘Do you realize that you can make a claim against the Dutch government?’”

So the Von Sahers began doing research and in January 1998, they asked the Dutch government to return the paintings. The request was denied, and they appealed. In 1999, a Dutch court ruled that it was “incompetent” to alter the government’s decision. That same year, the Austrian government returned 250 paintings to the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family; to date, it still holds the record as the world’s largest restitution.

“We spent the whole day in court and all the proceedings were in Dutch,” Charlene says, adding that they also began to track down art in private collections and museums on their own. “We could have just given up at that point, but we always believed in it. The Dutch government just thought that we would go away. At the very beginning, some Dutch government officials flew to New York to tell us we should leave it alone.”

And, Marei adds, “They told us, ‘Don’t show up with lawyers!’ During the nine years we were doing this, the government changed several times, so we had to start all over each time.”

Their big break came in 2001, when the first Goudstikker painting – Belgian artist Jan de Cock’s 16th-Century oil on wood “Temptation of St. Anthony” – was reunited with its rightful heirs. “It has so much meaning, especially because it comes from a private collection. There were no fights, no arguments to get it back,” Marei says. “I would guard it with my life.”

The de Cock is one of 42 paintings that the Von Sahers have recovered so far. Some have been auctioned to pay the bills associated with the search; the others are being stored out of state until a decision is made on their ultimate fate. “The de Cock gave us hope that we could continue further,” Charlene says. “With each painting, we come up with some sort of amicable solution. Sometimes they go to auction, and we split the proceeds.”

Buoyed by their success, in 2002, the Von Sahers hired the German art detective Clemens Toussaint to track down some of the Goudstikker works in private collections and museums.
But the controversy of the Goudstikker case forced the Dutch government to set up a Restitution Committee to handle special art-loss claims. In 2004, Marei took her case to the committee and this year won back 202 of the 267 works she requested from the Dutch National Collection. “It was time that they were returned,” Marei says. “Some people are happy about it, and some people are not. We feel that they had had them for a long time, and they have benefited from them for 60 years.”
Yes, Charlene adds, “It’s been unfair for 60 years.”

Only now that the Dutch battle is over have the Von Sahers begun tallying the costs. “We made sacrifices, but they weren’t only financial,” Marei says. “They were sacrifices of time and emotion. It forced me always to go back into the past. Now that is has been concluded positively, it’s a whole different going back into the past. We are so happy for my mother-in-law and for my late husband that we did win, but when you’re struggling for nine years, and you go back and you work on it, there were many hours when you lived in the past.”        

Now the past and present are intersecting to form a new future for the Von Sahers. Once they have the Dutch paintings – they can’t wait to actually see and touch them – they have to decide their fate. They have discussed a number of options, including creating a permanent gallery for them, and are considering writing a book about the Goudstikker story and their search.

“We have to find out what we have so we can decide what we can do with them and what we need to do with them while still honoring my grandfather and still honoring the art and also honoring all the people who helped us get the art,” Charlene says. “It’s a big responsibility.”

Whatever they end up doing, Marei says, the goal will be to make Goudstikker a household name again. “I want his name back in the world,” she says. “His name had been forgotten, and it had been pulled through the mud. It is our duty and our mission to straighten it out again and make Jacques Goudstikker what he used to be. We’re so proud of him, so everyone else needs to be.”

Although they are art experts, Marei and Charlene say their personal connection to the Goudstikker masterpieces has given them a keen appreciation of art that has spurred them to study the subject.

“We are not art collectors,” Marei says. “But we are in a fortunate position to now become art collectors, and how wonderful it is to have art that belonged to our family. It’s family property.”

Each of the Goudstikker paintings, which originally came with a China-red sticker on the back, is special, they say, becaues until they began their quest, they possessed only one from Desi’s estate – a portrait of two little girls by the 19th-Century French Impressionist Berthe Morrisot.

“One of the care-givers at the Goudstikker gallery grabbed it as everyone was fleeing and saved it for my grandmother,” Charlene says. “This was one of my grandmother’s favorite little treasures, and now it’s one of my mother’s favorites because it symbolizes her two daughters.”

Marei also is particularly fond of a restituted Rachel Ruysch still life. The Dutch Baroque era painter, she points out, became famous for painting realistic renditions of butterflies because “she put real butterflies in the painting and painted over them.” She also appreciates another recent find, a 19th-Century Constant Troyan titled simply “Cow in a Pasture” that was returned by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum  Fondation Corboud in Cologne.

While the Von Sahers wait for the containers of art from Holland, they are gearing up for more battles. They vow they will not rest until every single painting is back in the fold. The Dutch decision, they hope, will open the floodgates and force other collectors and museums, notably Pasadena’s Norton Simon, which has the 16th-Century diptych of Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder, to return other Nazi-appropriated art to the rightful owners. “We’re in negotiations with the Simon Norton,” Charlene says. “I have gone to see the diptychs. They are the jewel in the crown of the Goudstikker Collection, and they are the best pieces in the museum.”

With the remaining artworks scattered around the globe and secreted in private collections, their goal may be an impossible one, but it is one that they remain committed to. And this time, it will be three – not two – against the world: Chantal, who had spent the last five years in Lima, Peru, recently moved back to Greenwich and wants to help out.

“I hope people in similar situations learn from this that they should persevere because times have changed,” Marei says. “You just have to believe that there can be success, and you can get back what is rightfully yours.”

She is, after all, vibrant proof that it can be done. But at the moment, there are more mundane things to think about. She wakes the dogs, who have dozed off during the interview; it’s time for Rosie, Sissi and Sebastian to take their afternoon constitutional.

"There is still a lot of work ahead of us,” she says as she walks happily into the sunset.