Just hid his collection from the Nazis and communists
A previously lost collection of more than 300 pieces, ranging from porcelain figures, crystal, gold coins and rare busts of Hapsburg emperors, is going under the hammer at Sotheby's in December - after re-emerging from the past to prove that fact can be stranger than fiction.
But the real-life collector, Rudolph Just, managed to keep hold of his treasure during the Nazi and communist periods.
"I would expect more interest in this sale than we might normally have, because people are intrigued by Chatwin and Utz - and the actual story of Mr Just, which is quite remarkable," says Sotheby's expert Sebastian Kuhn.
Forced labour
Just was an art-lover who built up his collection in Prague in the 1930s.
Although a native German-speaker, he was caught in a round-up in 1944 and sent to a forced labour camp run by the infamous Todt organisation.
But he escaped and made his way back to Prague, where his collection was looked after by a family friend.
After the war, the communists seized power. Just declared his collection, and was able to keep it.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, he was a regular contributor to scholarly magazines in Switzerland and Germany, and was well-known in the art world.
But in 1962, a jealous neighbour denounced him for "speculating" - a crime that carried a heavy penalty in communist times.
Just proved his innocence in court, but from this time he went to ground.
'Secretive'
"Collectors in communist Czechoslovakia tended to be quite secretive by their very nature, and Just kept his collection in his apartment, in one room, to which only trusted friends were admitted," Mr Kuhn says.
"He had to be secretive because of his experiences."
Just stopped writing articles, and disappeared from the art world. After his death in 1972, his family dropped contacts with the art experts he had known.
"It's curious that when people tried to contact them, no-one found them," Mr Just said.
"I think the name wasn't on the doorbell anymore, but they must have been living at the same address, so perhaps that was just another measure they took to keep a low profile.
"People wondered what had happened to the collection."
Attack
The collection stayed a secret, even after the transition to democracy - kept by Just's second wife Ludmila until her death in 1992.
Then came an awful postscript to the story.
Just's grandson moved into the house, but was murdered by thieves who broke in and stole some of the items.
It is something the remaining family still cannot bear to talk about.
They decided to move the collection to a place where no-one would dream of looking - a tiny 13th-floor flat they held on a sprawling housing estate in Bratislava, now capital of the newly-independent Slovakia.
It was here the collection finally surfaced. Kuhn's Prague partner, Filip Marco, sent a letter to the Just family's old address. By chance, someone stopped by to pick up the mail - and responded to the letter.
'Revealed'
When Mr Marco and Mr Kuhn arrived in Bratislava, they found an Aladdin's cave of hidden treasure.
"I sat down on a laundry box, in which there was a Meissen Augustus Rex vase. The collection was revealed to us box by box," says Mr Marco.
"But to an anonymous visitor to the flat it was invisible. They hid other objects in an underground garage."
He adds that the collection was not only Just's obsession.
"The collection was number one in the family's life. Everything else was secondary."
'Tradition'
It is now expected to raise about £1m. But Kuhn says the real value lies elsewhere.
"It's the last of a tradition of collecting in central Europe which has more or less disappeared, characterised by an interest in several different fields - glass, porcelain, pottery, works of art," he says.
"You don't see collections like this anymore. This is the last in a big tradition of scholarly collecting," he says.
"Just had such an intriguing eye. He wasn't interested in easy, glamorous things.
"He liked objects that posed a problem. It's a reflection of his scholarly approach."
The Rudolph Just collection is auctioned at Sotheby's in Olympia, London, on 11 December.