Through the study of the restitution of instruments looted by the Nazis during the Occupation, Caroline Piketty is interested in the journeys of the victims and their place in collective history.
Honorary curator of the National Archives, Caroline Piketty offers us a new work. His previous book, I’m looking for traces of my mother. Chronicle of the archives (2006), approached in a very personal way the research into family administrative archives to which she had contributed as part of the Study Mission on the Spoliation of the Jews of France, chaired by Jean Mattéoli.
Looting of instruments
In this new opus, Caroline Piketty keeps this very personal tone and approaches history in a way that is neither entirely historical nor archival, but through the personal and emotional prism of “ little family stories » contained in the archives, which illuminate “ the great History » (p. 26). This work is part of a process of exploration and reflection on the theft of musical instruments and musical objects, also carried out for several years by various museums, including the Music Museum of the Philharmonie de Paris and the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels.
History is that ofEinsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Reichsleiter Rosenberg’s intervention team, or ERR), which by its division Sonderstab Musik took over thousands of instruments, original manuscripts and scores, but also several million musicological works and records, in France and in the occupied territories. This sprawling administration was the subject of a careful study published in 1996 under the title Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzsab Reichsleiter Rosenberg Under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europethe French translation of which only appeared in 2019 by Buchet-Chastel.
Under the control of the ideologue of the Nazi regime Alfred Rosenberg and the musicologist Herbert Gerigk, thousands of instruments were seized in France, mainly from looted Jewish apartments, and sent weekly to Germany between October 1942 and July 21, 1944. The most prestigious were intended for the Hohe Schulethis elite university project linked to the Nazi party, which included various institutes in Germany. The more ordinary instruments found themselves in the hands of members of the NSDAP or organizations linked to the regime, were offered to German families victims of the bombings or sent to the front for the entertainment of German troops.
In 1944, storage sites were distributed throughout Germany to absorb the daily flow of boxes from all over Europe. Much of it was destroyed during bombings. Another was discovered by Soviet allied troops who seized certain collections and evacuated them outside Germany where their trace was lost again. Finally, a last one was listed by the Western Allies and repatriated to the various countries from which the convoys had departed.
The stories are those that Caroline Piketty discovers in the archives during requests for restitution of furniture and musical instruments, in this case pianos, and which she delves into through various other archival funds, notably the National Archives, the Jewish file of the Police Prefecture, the archives of the Shoah Memorial as well as various private archives. Among the colossal sum of these documents, the author made a choice “ to shed light on the scale and brutality of the spoliations which struck all neighborhoods and all social circles “.
Likewise, she discusses some stories of families where there was no piano, “ to illustrate the extent of the looting which affected works of art, furniture, books, as well as the most rudimentary domestic objects. » Finally, she gives “ two examples of non-Jewish families, because the Germans helped themselves almost everywhere (p. 25). One choice, announced without explanation, however, distances us from the historical approach: that of having modified certain family names.
Recognize your piano
From the introduction, we are immersed in the “ chaos » (p. 13) of the greenhouses of the Palmarium, located next to the Jardin d’acclimatation, inside which nearly 2,000 pianos were stored from April 1945. An announcement in the press, on April 11, allowed the robbed owners to claim their piano from the Restitution Service, which subsequently summoned them to the Palmarium and, a little later, to annexes, to the Palais de Tokyo and to the Paris Fair.
Personified by Caroline Piketty, these pianos “ conversed in silence, some proud of their memories, others confused, heckled by the previous four years » (p. 22). The description of the state of storage of the pianos, classified by size then by brand, stored head to tail, on the edge, in poorly lit places, devoid of the accessories which sometimes made them unique or at least easily recognizable, immediately announces the perilous, almost impossible mission that was ahead: the owners who did not keep track of the serial number of the instrument often encountered the material impossibility of formally recognizing their piano.
From the outset, we understand the issue of complaints. While many deportees did not return, reconstituting the family environment as they had left it when they left was vital for their loved ones: the return of furniture and instruments had to precede that of their loved one. And the piano occupied a privileged place, as evidenced by numerous letters of complaint, including that of Benjamin Cohen who wrote about his wife: “ I can’t imagine seeing her come home without finding her piano » (p. 88).
We understand all the better the pain and disillusionment of the thousands of anonymous people who, for lack of documents attesting to the specific characteristics of their instrument, were unable to recover their piano due to the impossibility of distinguishing it among the mass of others of the same quality. The fact that the restitution service offered loans of unclaimed instruments while awaiting other arrivals and other investigations partly responded to this dismay.
Slice of life
Throughout the chapters, singular life journeys are revealed, all broken, sometimes permanently, by persecution. Young Jewish resistance fighters, Hedy and Gilberte Nissim, rub shoulders with Vladimir Jankélévitch, Léon Blum, the future archbishop Aron Lustiger and the collector Béatrice de Camondo.
The first part tells of the spoliation. Thirteen life stories compiled from spoliation files and various archival documents relate by metonymy the looting of apartments, goods and furniture in occupied France, including pianos, as well as the occupation of housing by the occupying forces or by greedy neighbors. We are witnessing separation from loved ones, amid threats of raids, denunciations, arrests and deportations. We read the summons to the police station, the departures for Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, Drancy or Compiègne which often lead to Auschwitz, the exile of broken families. We follow the strategies to stay in France: flight to the free zone, conversion, sending children to the countryside. A chapter opens a parenthesis on the presence of pianos serving the entertainment of the troops, whether on the German side thanks to looting or on the American side with the manufacture of specific pianos, the “ victory “.
The very empathetic approach and the sometimes romantic style come out of archival research to bear witness to the tragedy experienced by the authors of the letters and their families: “ Nausea overcame me upon reading these denunciations. How could someone relentlessly attack a poor woman separated from her children? ? » (p. 42). We are often kept in suspense, a certain number of family stories, stated in part, continuing in the second part of the work.
Lives turned upside down
Twenty-six portraits constitute the second part, devoted to “ back »: that of the pianos, that of the deportees, sometimes neither, just false hopes aroused by misspelled first names on the walls of the Lutetia hotel, where the names of the repatriated people appeared.
The letters of complaint to the Restitutions service, some written as early as April 1945, and the archives relating to each person followed by the author reveal the extent of the spoliations, but also the important role of the concierges, for some informers having led to the arrest of family members of the victims of spoliations, for other witnesses of the looting of the apartments who can attest precisely to the dates of the spoliation.
Some letters, like that of Roger Payan, are accompanied by photos of the piano, others by drawings representing the instrument. Rivka Ziboulsky attaches a photo of herself posing with the instrument, an unusual Champ Rameau that she will manage to recognize at the Palmarium. Jankélévitch “ does not list his belongings according to the rooms in his apartment, but gives them a Prévert-style description » (p. 96), carefully detailing the titles of the titles and scores that made up his library, but strangely omitting his two grand pianos. Blanche Blum provides the serial number of her instrument, but must give up her return because she is condemned to live in unsanitary and cramped accommodation, unable to regain possession of her apartment occupied by undesirables in no hurry to leave the premises.
Music at the heart of the cataclysm
These little stories are so many adventures from which we ardently hope for a happy outcome: Léon Yehouda Klein finds his piano by chance when he recognizes the characteristic sound, which escapes from one of the houses in the village where his house was looted. Myriam Alevi thinks she recognizes her piano at the Palmarium and, after transporting it to her apartment, is definitely sure of it when she rediscovers the claw marks that her cat had left there. Léon Ikor and Léon Blum found part of their books in seizures made by the Soviets and transferred to Moscow.
Some tried to make claims to the Allied troops, arguing that looted pianos were still being used in 1945, this time for the entertainment of the liberating soldiers. The Pleyel double piano of Béatrice de Camondo is for its part “ spotted near Leipzig on a train stranded in the countryside, among the luggage of a routed German general » (p. 137).
But some of the instruments have disappeared. Of the cases investigated by Caroline Piketty, only fourteen people found their instrument, three benefited from the granting of another piano. The author deals with the shortcomings of the files and assumes them: “ As is often the case, I don’t know much about this story of looting. » (p. 128).
Beyond the few happy cases of reunion with a cherished piece of furniture, reality reminds us, implacable: family destinies have been turned upside down and most of the people discussed in this book do not see their loved ones return. The consolation of having found a piano cannot fill the void left by the boxes of books and furniture that have disappeared permanently. Returning from deportation is sometimes accompanied by painful procedures to recover occupied accommodation or request French Mutual Assistance to cope with destitution.
As Serge Klarsfeld put it about the work The File by Annette Kahn, published in 1992, Stolen harmonies Caroline Piketty allows you to
soothe still-living pain by explaining destiny, by providing written traces of this destiny, by reintegrating individual tragedy into the collective drama ; by allowing the memory to be perpetuated when the grandchildren and their descendants can and will be able to receive documentary evidence of their family’s passage through this cataclysm of history that was the Shoah.