The Pieces from Berlin [Hardcover]

Michael Pye (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 25, 2003

From the author of Taking Lives: a riveting new novel, inspired by a true story from secret criminal files, about a woman who made her fortune trafficking stolen art in wartime Berlin—and the fearsome price other people paid for her crimes.

Lucia Müller-Rossi is the grandest of Zurich antique dealers, still flourishing and still respect-able in her nineties. Her past is unknown, or conveniently ignored, until the day Sarah Freeman looks into her shop window and sees a delicate inlaid table that she and her husband once owned before the war. It is a “piece from Berlin,” and because of it, decades of lies and silence are about to end.

With the skills of a master storyteller and the insights of a historian, Michael Pye brings to life the devastating legacy that shadows the Holocaust. The Pieces from Berlin is the graphic story of survivors finding the courage to face a buried past, as Lucia’s son, Nicholas, patches his memories of wartime Berlin into a true picture of his mother’s life and crimes, and Sarah Freeman tries to exorcise her ghosts by involving an Englishman who has his own wartime scars.

Their intensely moving stories cast brilliant light on the terrible choices people must make in the very worst of times—and the human toll they exact through the generations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An agonizing moral issue beats at the heart of this searching novel about individual survival at the cost of complicity with evil. Based on the case of a real woman, Pye's narrative examines the shady life of fictional Lucia Muller-Ross, who spirited vanloads of valuable antiques entrusted to her by their Jewish owners out of Berlin and into Switzerland at the end of WWII. Sixty years later, Lucia is the elderly, proud and respected owner of an antiques shop in Zurich, when Sarah Freeman, a Holocaust survivor, spies in the store's window a table she once owned. Sarah's anguished need for emotional restitution sparks a tragic upheaval in Lucia's family. Lucia's son, Nicholas, a middle-aged professor and historian, has never allowed himself to think about his mother's murky past. Lucia's granddaughter, Helen, who has been unaware of the accusations leveled against her grandmother in a postwar court case in which she was acquitted, now feels a compulsion to bring Lucia to justice. Pye's (The Drowning Room) taut, restrained prose eschews melodrama, though flashbacks to the nights when Berlin was pounded by Allied bombing are vividly rendered. In the book's most harrowing scene, "the blast bombs [were]: timpani and fire... the sky was all neon," as nine-year-old Nicholas, alone in Lucia's apartment, watches the city die. Despite Pye's control, he leans too heavily on the repetition of "anger" and "rage" to describe the characters' inner emotions. An Englishman who becomes Sarah's friend, meant to provide another perspective on wartime moral ambiguity, is more a device than a rounded character. Yet the tension mounts, and the last few chapters reveal the terrible price Lucia paid for her amoral (but perhaps excusable?) behavior. In the end, this penetrating psychological study reverberates with an urgent message: life consists of choices, and all have long-lasting consequences.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When Sarah Freeman passes a Zurich antiques shop owned by Lucia Muller-Rossi and spies an inlaid table that she and her husband had owned in pre-World War II Berlin, a window is opened on crimes half a century old. In the early 1940s, Muller-Rossi, Italian by birth and married to a Swiss, is in Berlin with her young son, Nicholas, living by her wits, trading sex or whatever else for privilege. Her outsider status gives her a degree of freedom not enjoyed by most Berliners, and she assists her Jewish acquaintances in hiding their belongings or getting them out of the country. As Berlin crumbles beneath the Allied Powers' bombing, she leaves for Switzerland with eight truckloads of goods, making her fortune by selling the art and antiques of owners who will never return. Even at a remove of 50 years, the sudden revelation of truth profoundly affects Lucia, Nicholas, Sarah, and those around them. The effect is not quite so powerful for the reader, who can sense the writer's shaping of the story. But that is not to say that this book is simply a stylistic tour de force. A beautifully crafted and finely nuanced tale of guilt and moral complicity, it possesses a psychological depth that sets it apart from other novels dealing with the Holocaust. Recommended for public libraries.
Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First edition. edition (February 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414363
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414367
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,769,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, June 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pieces from Berlin (Hardcover)

Having read the tepid review in the New York Times, I was anxious to decide for myself. While the framework of the plot is certainly beguiling, the story moves at such a languid pace I was anxious to read further in the hope that the story might gain some momentum. The frequent asides, and constant change of subject, is not what one expects in a novel. I often finished a paragraph wanting more. The exposition of the characters is incomplete and I fet that I didn't really get to know anyone well except for Lucia, the protagonist. Moreover, anachronistic inventions should never be used since they detract from the plausibility of the story. For instance, the reference to the use of plastic dishes in a Berlin hotel in 1943, or the reference to attempts at CPR (modern day cardiopulmonary resescitation) in London, circa 1945. All in all, a disappointing read. Other books tackling the same subject are much more gripping.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life's decisions and rationalizations, April 13, 2003

By 

Glenn Miller (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pieces from Berlin (Hardcover)

Pye has written a beautiful book about a flawed person, Lucia Muller-Rossi. This 92-year-old matriarch, living in Zurich, made out extremely well during World War II, not only stealing (or "saving", as she rationalizes) antiques and art pieces from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also informing the Nazis on the whereabouts of her Jewish friends. Toward the end of the war, when Berlin was about to fall, Muller-Rossi was able to take these possessions out of Berlin in several large trucks, cross the border into Switzerland, and set up shop. The book's action is built around two hard-to-believe coincidences. First, that one of her victims happens to walk past Muller-Rossi's store window and recognize a table that had been taken from her 60 years earlier. Second, that right at that moment when the victim, Sarah Freeman, spots the table, Muller-Rossi's granddaughter walks by, sees Freeman crying, and asks what's wrong. Seemingly implausible, but I bought it. What I struggled with was why Muller-Rossi's granddaughter, Helen, and son -- Helen's father, Nicholas -- were so willing to side with Freeman at the expense of Muller-Rossi. We simply had to take this leap that son and granddaughter were willing to accept a stranger's story without giving Lucia a chance to explain her side of events. As a reader of a novel, we did get a sense of Lucia's side, but unfortunately, there wasn't much to like. She was, plain and simple, an opportunist without much of a decent bone in her body, mother of a young son during wartime or not. Although Pye's writing and evocation of time and place is splendid, the book would ultimately have been more powerful if Muller-Rossi had been created as a more sympathetic character. One of Pye's key points is that life can be quite grey. Unfortunately, his main character comes off as black-and-white.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A missed chance on a very interesting theme, October 17, 2003

By 

Linda Oskam "dutch-traveller" (Amsterdam Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pieces from Berlin (Hardcover)

Lucia Müller-Rossi is a 90 year old antiques dealer in Zürich, Switzerland. She has a son, Nicholas, and a granddaughter, Helen, with whom she has a rather formal contact. This is due to the fact that the family has a secret: the antiques that Lucia is selling were not obtained honestly, but were given to her for storage by Berlin Jews. When one day one of her victims, Sarah Freeman, recognizes one of the tables in the antiques shop as her own, the family finally has to face the truth, which leads to a big domestic drama.

The facts on which this novel is built are of course fascinating: the trade in Jewish goods which "changed owner" illegally during the Nazi regime. Unfortunately, the story remains unclear for a long time and there are a number of story lines that have not been exploited properly: what is the role of Peter Clarke, why did Helen never before confront her grandmother with the truth and what happens in the end with the table that started it all? A missed chance, a pity.