From Argentina to Europe: One Call That Changed a Family’s Legacy Forever

In 2018, an elderly gentleman in his 60s, living quietly in Santiago del Estero, Argentina, received an unexpected phone call. On the line was a team of asset recovery specialists who had been tracing Holocaust-era assets across Europe. That call marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey into his family’s forgotten past — and ended with the successful restitution of three separate confiscated assets.

For the experts at MyWebridge, the story had started years earlier. Through relentless archival work and international heir tracing, they uncovered the trail of multiple dormant bank accounts in Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. All the accounts were linked to a Jewish woman from Riga, Latvia — a member of a family that once owned one of the five largest private banks in the Russian Empire.

She, like millions of others, perished in the Holocaust — along with nearly all her immediate family.

But there was one surviving thread.

MyWebridge researchers conducted in-depth genealogical investigations across Poland, Latvia, France, and Argentina. They uncovered a rare family tree, drawn nearly 80 years ago, and compared it with newly discovered records. It turned out that the asset holder had four siblings. All were murdered during the Holocaust — except for one niece, who escaped with her husband to Argentina and rebuilt her life there.

That niece eventually passed away, and her only son — the elderly man in Argentina — was her rightful heir.

Armed with this historical and legal proof, MyWebridge represented him in three successful Holocaust restitution claims, including one to the British government for a bank account opened in the 1930s with a deposit of just £1,985.60.

Thanks to interest and inflation adjustments, that account alone resulted in a payment of £78,431.20 to the heir.

But this wasn’t just about money.

The client also received something priceless — the full story of his Jewish family, stretching back to the early 19th century, and the unexpected joy of discovering living relatives in France.