Under what was called the M-Aktion (Möbel Aktion, or Furniture Operation), the Dienststelle Westen (Western Office) of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg stripped “Jewish” apartments in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands of their contents. Beginning in 1942, the Nazis shipped these stolen household items to German-occupied territories in the East. By August 1944, the Western Office estimated that officials had completely confiscated items from more than 38,000 homes in Paris alone. As the war reached its conclusion, governments across Europe began attempts to return recovered looted items to their original owners. Without official records of the looting conducted as part of M-Aktion, French officials relied on victims to provide inventories of their missing moveable property, which included at least 8000 pianos. Caroline Piketty’s slim volume examines the looting and restitution of these pianos stolen from Jews residing in Paris as a means of opening a window into the lives of Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors in France.
Piketty’s book is one of series of recent works that examine the looting and/or restitution of personal property in France that integrates both individual stories and the broader historical narrative surrounding the Holocaust. These studies tend to focus on a particular angle to approach looting and restitution such as individual families, art and cultural treasures, or apartment leases. (See, for example, Anne Grynberg, Sur nos traces: Récits de persécution, spoliation, reparations: Doc Francaise, 2023; James McAuley, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France: Yale, 2021; and Isabelle Backouche, Sarah Gensburger, and Eric Le Bourhis, Appartements témoins: La spoliation des locataires juifs à Paris, 1940-1946: La Découverte, 2025. On the Furniture Operation in France and postwar attempts at restitution, see Shannon L. Fogg, Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947: Oxford, 2017.)
Piketty has chosen pianos as her focus, noting that the archives reveal that “no effort was spared in trying to identify the instrument that symbolized a vanished family universe” (143). The pianos serve as a way for Piketty to examine the transitional period during the spring of 1945 that was marked by the waiting for and return of both people and material objects. When the French provisional government began publishing newspaper notices about the recovery of pianos in April 1945, Paris had been liberated but the war was not yet over. The first camp survivors and prisoners of war were returning to France and family members anxiously sought news of their loved ones while they worked to recover their stolen homes and personal items. Pianos, then, serve as the lens through which Piketty examines both loss and recovery from individual perspectives.
The book is divided into two parts: Pillage and Return. Both sections are made up of short vignettes of personal stories, the majority of which revolve around Jewish families and a piano. Many of the histories have been gleaned from the letters individuals sent to the French Restitution Service following the April newspaper announcement about recovered pianos. Piketty includes well-known individuals such as former Prime Minister Léon Blum, whose looted piano had been a wedding gift; Aron Lustiger, the future archbishop of Paris, who played duets with his sister before their mother's deportation; and Mireille Berl, a well-known composer who wrote music for songs made famous by Maurice Chevalier at her white-lacquered grand piano. Piketty also includes the stories of ordinary Parisians who hoped to identify their missing pianos by the cat scratches on its base or the mothballs they had slipped inside the instrument. Piketty includes some individuals in both the “Pillage” and “Return” sections of the book, including Myriam Alevi, who lived at 66 rue de Bondy, and whose piano was scratched by the family's cat. (For more on the return of Jewish residents to this address, see Hilary S. Handin, “La réinsertion socioéconomique troublée des juifs parisiens après la Shoah. Le cas des conflits entre locataires au 66 rue René Boulanger, 1944-1946,” Histoire Urbaine 62 (December 2021): 129–144. The street’s name was changed after the war.) Unlike other pillaged home furnishings, pianos were more easily identifiable due to engraved manufacturer’s information and a serial number. However, the owners’ documents also often disappeared during the looting leaving families searching for details that could distinguish their beloved instrument from the 2,221 recovered pianos in Paris.
The book is written in French for a general audience, and readers hear Piketty’s own voice and experiences throughout the vignettes, further emphasizing the importance of the personal and the long-lasting emotional effects of wartime material losses. For Holocaust survivors, the pianos represented their former lives, their loved ones, and the desire to rebuild their pre-war lives. (Kateřina Králová also explores the connections between the pre-war and post-war periods as a source of disappointment in Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-1946: University of Chicago Press, 2025.) Piketty details one man’s quest to recover his deported wife’s piano as he could not imagine the former piano teacher returning home without it being there. Piketty also includes the story of a woman that she helped locate archival documents related to the survivor’s family, including their piano. In addition to learning the details of her family members’ wartime experiences, the former hidden child learned that her grandson now practiced piano on the instrument that had once belonged to her grandfather. It is these links between the “before” and “after” along with the ideas of “waiting” and “return” that represent the book’s main themes. Piketty uses these “small” family histories to shed light on the “grand” historical narrative (26).
Indeed, readers are introduced to the historical events of the war, Holocaust, and postwar reconstruction through the individual stories. Not only do we learn of the numbers of looted, recovered, and returned pianos but we also learn of their distribution to Nazi dignitaries, Wehrmacht garrisons, and individual families in Germany as well as their dispersal to various entertainment venues in occupied Paris. We also encounter the bureaucratic restitution process, its various agencies, and the unorganized depots where recovered pianos were collected. We learn about immigration, musicians, and composers as well as discrimination, round-ups, the camps within France, deportation, and repatriation. What is missing, however, are the laws and measures regulating postwar restitution (and later reparations.) Piketty draws on family papers, oral histories, personal interviews, and memoirs in addition to records held in archives to add details to daily lives and individual experiences. Her extensive knowledge of the sources is reflected by the fact that she was the archivist for the Study Group on the Spoliation of the Jews of France (Mattéoli Commission) and the co-author of the commission's archival research guide. However, this is not a traditional scholarly monograph with extensive footnotes and a bibliography of primary sources, which may be frustrating for readers wishing to delve deeper into the topic. Scholars will recognize Piketty’s descriptions of chance finds in the documents and serendipitous conversations that help fill in some blanks. Her engaging writing style and the short vignettes hold the reader’s attention and achieve her goal of combining historical narratives, individual experiences, and pianos to understand some of the challenges facing Holocaust survivors in France during the spring of 1945.
