October 24th, 2008
Review – Sarah’s Key
Sarah’s Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay
It isn’t often that I find a book that I can recommend without reservation. This is one of those books. The story is fascinating, emotional, and pulls you in. You won’t want to put it down but you will so you can think about what you have just read. You will have to remind yourself to take a breath. It will make you cry and cheer.
On July 16, 1942, the French police rounded up Jewish families in order to send them to Auschwitz for extermination. The Nazis wanted only the adults but the French took whole families and then tore them apart. The children were ultimately sent later and all (more than 4,000) were immediately killed as soon as they arrived at the death camp. Sarah is 10 years old when the Paris police knock on her door. Her 4 year old brother Michel is too terrified to go so Sarah locks him in a secret cabinet promising to come back to free him and then she is taken away.
Sixty years later, Julia, an American living in Paris, is given the assignment of writing an article for the sixtieth anniversary of what has become known as Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv, the roundup and murder of Parisian Jews in 1942. As she investigates the story she finds that few French know or care about those events. It is the past and most Parisians wish to leave it that way. During her research, Julia discovers the story of Sarah and finds that Sarah’s story intermingles with her family’s story as the apartment that her husband’s family moved into in 1942 is the same apartment Sarah was torn from in 1942.
The first half of the book mixes these two stories in short chapters of only a couple of pages that keep the story moving quickly. The story of Sarah is what we wish to follow so the interludes with Julia as we learn about her family, her job, and the beginnings of her investigation of Sarah are kept short. The result is that the first half of the book is among some of the best writing I have encountered recently. We learn the story of Sarah, a character we wish we could wrap our arms around and protect, while being introduced to Julia, a character that we learn to like.
At the end of the first half of the book, Sarah’s voice is gone and we count on Julia, who we have learned to like, to tell us the rest of the story. de Rosnay wraps Julia and Sarah’s story together in the second half of the book so that we learn what happened to Sarah through Julia’s investigation as we see how Sarah’s story changes Julia. The second half of the story is not as strong as the first half but I still could not put the book down and had to race through the last chapters to find how it ends. This is an amazing story that reminds us that the Holocaust was about the murder of innocent people including little children whose only crime was being born Jewish. Strongly recommended.
Leah wrote,
I will have to get this book! When I was a senior in high school we had to read a book about the holocaust, which lead to me reading another book called “Anya” which I ended up reading every 3 or 4 years during my adulthood until I lost it during my last move. Anya was the beginning of my fascination with holocaust books. I think it was the idea that people could SURVIVE these horrible things. The the human spirit could be resilient. I couldn’t understand how there could be such sick people in the world, and know that they’re still out there today. I read about the doctors, and the experiments, it was all just unbelievable to me. When my boys were 10 or so, we watched a movie called “The Devil’s Arithmetic”. A Billy Graham production about a family born from Holocause survivors, and how the kids of today can’t connect, and how it’s being forgotten. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a great movie for tweens and young adults. Really…our entire extended family watched it together and when the movie ended, the room was silent for several minutes as well all pondered what we’d just watched.
Link | October 24th, 2008 at 9:30 pm