Sarah’s Key
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 0 secondsSarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is the untold story of the roundup of the Jews in Paris in July 1942. The novel focuses on how the French were complicit in rounding up thousands of Jews in 1942. It is also a reminder that we can never allow another genocide. I finished this book the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, the date on which the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp complex was liberated in 1945.
Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. But before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family’s apartment. She keeps the key, thinking she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years and married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it.
The twin narratives of Sarah and Julia hold the first two-thirds of the book together and make it a page-turner. Sarah’s memory reminds us during the final third of the book and ensures that the complete story of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and its lasting impact are told.
As Goodreads describes the novel,
In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah’s past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.
Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.
I highly recommend the book.
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