I’ve read Holocaust novels before. And I’ve read about suffering and strife, in different forms and contexts, over and over again. But books don’t usually make me cry simply because I can put them down, take a break, catch my breath if a storm starts to brew. Sarah’s Key was different. I welled up within the first twenty pages, yet I was completely captivated, mesmerizied by the characters.
The novel explores the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up in Paris on July 16th and 17th, 1942. Over the course of two days, the French police took 12,884 victims—including 4,051 children. Six-year-old Sarah tells her heartbreaking story first hand, while a modern-day journalist named Julia learns about the mass round-up and about Sarah herself. I think that I was so deeply touched because the female characters resonated with me on many levels.
While I won’t ruin the entire book by telling you the key’s significance, there were a few other things that I found most interesting in this book:
- The unbelievable number of children that the French—not German—police took.
- The number of French onlookers and organizers, their willingness to ignore the events as they happened, and their ability to deny them so many years later.
- How Sarah eventually came to live a lie; she moved to America and fully reinvented herself without an ounce of allusion to her true identity.
Click here for more information about the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up, and be sure to watch this brief interview with the author of Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay:
