Page Thirty-Eight

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay

"Such hate, thought the girl. Why such hate? She had never hated anyone in her life, except perhaps a teacher, once . . . Had she ever wished that woman dead? She pondered. Yes, she had. So maybe that's how it worked. That's how all this had happened. Hating people so much that you wanted to kill them. Hating them because they wore a yellow star" (88).

"You're playing with Pandora's box. Sometimes, it's better not to open it. Sometimes, it's better not to know" (127).

The first half of this book was difficult to stop reading. It began on that fateful day, July 16 1942, when thousands of Jewish children and their parents were rounded up in Paris and taken to the Velodrome d'Hiver, the day known as the Vel' d'Hiv'. After waiting for days in deplorable conditions, they were taken to two camps in the French countryside, and from there, after the children were brutally separated from their parents, deported to Auschwitz where they were immediately assassinated. No one survived - unless they managed to escape. The book begins with one 10-year old girl's account of hearing the French police knock on her door late at night. Sarah is taken with her parents but tries to save her little brother by locking him in a cupboard they played hide and seek in, certain she would return and get him out, certain she was saving him from whatever she and her parents were about to face. She leaves, gripping the key to the cupboard in her pocket. As the days go on, Sarah becomes tormented by her decision, knowing that if no one came to save Michel he would certainly have died. Her torment exists alongside the disgusting conditions at the stadium and the inhuman treatment at the camp. Sarah's story seesaws back and forth with the story of Julia Jarmond, a mid-40s American who has lived in Paris half her life and has been asked to research the Vel' d'Hiv' for a journalism assignment. Julia becomes caught up in Sarah's story and soon comes to realize Sarah's history is tangled up with her own.

As mentioned, the first half of the book is incredibly gripping. The second half of the book, however, once the author leaves Sarah's story and focusses on Julia and present day, becomes less an historical fiction on the Holocaust and more a story about a woman trying to come to terms with a new identity. Still interesting, but it lost some of its lustre for me. I found some of the author's "revelations" in the book were not revelations at all, but too obvious to be considered crafty writing, like a mystery where you knew who the murderer was all along.

That said, this was a very good book that I would recommend. It exposes the French apathy towards their part in this dark period in history, and it sheds light on a part of the Holocaust most readers would not have been made aware of without having read this book.