Czech museum to return original Beethoven score to family that fled HolocaustPetschek family tried, but failed, to send handwritten manuscript abroad by mail in March 1939 during the Nazi occupation, drawing the attention of the GestapoPRAGUE (AP) — A musical manuscript handwritten by Ludwig van Beethoven is getting returned to the heirs of the richest family in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, whose members had to flee the country to escape the Holocaust.Beethoven composed the six-movement String Quartet in B-flat Major in 1825-1826 as part of his work on a series of quartets commissioned by Russian Prince Nicholas Galitzin.It’s known that Beethoven, who died in 1827, gave the fourth movement to his secretary, Karl Holz, and at least two other private owners in Vienna acquired it before the Petscheks.Anne Webber, the co-chair of the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, said that despite 47 countries agreeing in 2009 to try to resolve Holocaust-era injustices, “the restitution of artworks that were looted often seems to be as distant prospect as ever.”“Some 90% of all artworks being sought today by families have been neither found nor returned,” Webber said at a conference held in Prague last month to review the progress made since the non-binding Terezín Declaration was adopted.The declaration urged governments to make every effort to return former Jewish communal and religious property confiscated by the Nazis, fascists and their collaborators, and recommended that countries implement programs to address the issue of private buildings and land."