A secret room that saved this girl's life - BBC

It's a groundbreaking modernist masterpiece, in fact, and it's at the centre of a campaign to establish the claims of Dolly's family to an art collection which they lost in the war.

They held out the tantalising prospect of freedom to her: she could have a visa, allowing her to leave Holland with her family, in exchange for a painting by the French artist Henri Fantin-Latour.

In her memoirs, Dolly describes a desperate scene as her mother and father entrust her into the care of her nanny, Anna, while doing their best to shield her from the horror of what is about to happen.

For a little girl, one of the hardest things was staying perfectly quiet, so when the Allies finally liberated Amsterdam in 1945 and Dolly could come out of hiding, the exhilaration and relief of it was expressed for her in everyday sounds.

Murnau mit Kirche II is a highly significant work in art history, harking back to what the Russian had absorbed from Cezanne and Van Gogh in Paris, but also looking ahead to the influence he would have over Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others in New York.

It seems fitting that his vivid lost masterpiece should be linked to the story of a little girl who found joy in the everyday music of footsteps in liberated streets.