My grandfather told me once I was meant to be the heiress of a family-owned winery.

Inside the courthouse gates, the ghosts of unfinished stories sit beside me in the cold, marble-columned silence. My grandfather’s voice echoes in my mind, recounting a spiel riddled with missing pieces about a winery that was never mine — a legacy he says was stolen long before I was born.

The author in front of the Supreme Court / JURIST

A shared family name is all that connects me to generations of Jewish winemakers, entrepreneurs who once carefully aged the sweet and sophisticated Tokaj wines in the foggy river valleys of Hungary.

In the 1940s, like so many others, the Gottdiener Brothers’ legacy was stolen.

The winery’s licenses and operations were stripped by German influence.

The brothers were deported to a concentration camp.

Their livelihoods and ultimately their lives were extinguished in the Holocaust’s systematic brutality.

Last week, I sat in the United States Supreme Court. I listened to oral arguments not as a winery heiress, but as a law student witnessing another family of Holocaust survivors who stood before the US’s highest justices, wearing kippot, and arguing for long-overdue justice.

Holocaust-era expropriations in US courts 

During World War II, some two-thirds of Hungary’s pre-war Jewish population was systematically exterminated. What began with a concentration of the country’s Jewish population into ghettos ultimately led to their mass deportation to Nazi concentration camps. During the height of the deportation campaign, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote of the plight of the Hungarian Jews, “There is no doubt in my mind that we are in the presence of one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed.” By the time the war ended and the concentration camps were liberated, some 500,000 of the country’s estimated 825,000 pre-war Jewish population had died.

Those who survived quickly discovered they had nothing to return to. While whole communities were sent to concentration camps, property of Jewish families was confiscated by Hungarian officials. According to court documents, in November 1944, “the Hungarian government declared all valuable objects owned by Jews — except for their most personal items — part of the national wealth of Hungary. Hungary confiscated and liquidated much of that property.”

It is against this backdrop that survivors and their families — plaintiffs in Republic of Hungary v. Rosalie Simon, et al. — have turned to the Supreme Court to appeal for justice in the US. Fourteen survivors — most of whom were adolescents at the time of the Holocaust — and heirs are pursuing a class action lawsuit against Hungary and its state-run railway company, seeking compensation for the property that was taken from their families.

Normally, cases such as this would fall beyond the scope of US jurisdiction. The key challenge here is the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which broadly protects foreign governments from being sued in US courts. The FSIA establishes that foreign states are immune to facing lawsuits in US courts. Though the law only dates back to 1976, its applicability is retroactive, thus encompassing the period at issue in this case. But this immunity is subject to exceptions, such as in cases where a violation of international law leads to US commercial activities.

In this case, the plaintiffs argue that proceeds generated from their expropriated property were commingled with government assets over time and used for commercial activity in the US, thus establishing a commercial activity exception. Hungary disagrees, arguing that creating an exception based on historical commingling such as that described by plaintiffs would be overly broad, thus “allow[ing] the expropriation exception to swallow the general rule of foreign sovereign immunity.”

The legal battle has dragged on for years, bouncing between different courts. The latest major decision came from the DC Circuit Court, which sided with the survivors on a key issue, ruling that survivors do not have to prove exactly how the stolen property connects to Hungary’s current business dealings in America. This ruling conflicts with how another federal court, the Second Circuit, has handled similar cases. Hungary has now asked the Supreme Court to step in and resolve this disagreement, warning that the DC Circuit’s approach could lead to an avalanche of lawsuits against foreign governments in US courts.

Supreme Court arguments

As the survivors and heirs faced Hungarian authorities before the Supreme Court last week, the key issue was whether the seized property had a compelling connection to the US so as to overcome the FSIA.

In considering the parties’ arguments, the justices frequently mentioned an expensive painting as an example of an identifiable family heirloom. A party seeking restitution needs to show the identifiable expropriated property did not just stay in one country, but somehow touched US soil or commerce. The lawyers need to show that the stolen assets were not completely disconnected from the US economic system.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Shay Dvoretzky, argued the Hungarian government stole the families’ property, liquidated or exchanged it for money, commingled those funds with other funds in an account, then used those commingled funds to pay interest and buy equipment in the US.

The lawyer for the Republic of Hungary (petitioner), Joshua Glasgow, argued this was inadequate to prove the relevant commercial exception. Glasgow said the Court should reject commingling without “more.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed unsatisfied. “So, what’s the ‘more’?” she asked. “Is it tracing?”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett later returned to Justice Sotomayor’s question, asking Glasgow to give her “something to hold onto.”

The Court went on to question counsel for the petitioners in depth about what the “test” should be to establish a connection between items exchanged, even if there are multiple layers of transactions to track.

“But just how do I think about the word ‘exchanged’ then?” Justice Barrett asked Sopan Joshi, counsel for the US supporting the petitioners. “I mean, let’s imagine that I steal Justice Neil Gorsuch’s car.” The courtroom laughed.

Justice Barrett posed a hypothetical: she sold Justice Gorsuch’s car for a painting, then sold the painting and bought a beach house. The first step of selling the stolen car would be the “exchange” in cases like these, she concluded. But, according to a case called Sabbatino, the expropriation exception may still apply to more than one “exchange.”

The second issue is about how much proof the parties need to provide right at the beginning of their lawsuit. Do they need to show a full, complete story immediately, or just enough to suggest their story might be true?

The justices seemed reluctant to delve into the second two questions presented to the Court.

The third issue is about shifting the burden of proof. Here, the lawyers are arguing that once they show some initial evidence, the Hungarian government should have to disprove their claims about the property’s connection to the US. Justice Gorsuch asked Joshi why the petitioners did not contest the issue of burden in their brief. Then, the following exchange occurred.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was concerned about foreign policy. Counsel for the Simon family was quick to respond. “I think you should assume that Congress intended to do something when it passed the expropriation exception,” Dvoretzky said.

Looking ahead

This case represents one of the last opportunities for Holocaust survivors and their descendants to seek some form of justice. Witnesses to the tragic era are disappearing. As the generation of direct survivors grows older, these legal battles take on a new level of urgency. The lawyers are not just fighting for money – they are fighting for historical recognition, for the validation of losses that were never properly acknowledged.

The maze is complex. Each turn requires parties to provide evidence of commercial transactions that happened decades ago, across borders, under circumstances of extreme persecution, or later, convoluted by secrecy and bureaucracy.

The Supreme Court’s decision could set a precedent that makes it easier or harder for victims of historical injustices to seek legal recourse in US courts. This case is not just about this one family – it is about how future cases of historical property seizure might be handled. As the justices lean forward, listening intently to arguments about property seized decades ago, I cannot help but see the outlines of my grandfather’s daydreams — the winery that might have been, the bottles never produced, the story interrupted.

Leah DeFreitas is a 2L at Georgetown University Law Center and a Washington DC correspondent for JURIST.