Sarah's Key

Genre: Fiction

This is the story of Sarah and Julia, a young Jewish girl living in Paris, France during the beginning of WWII and an American expatriate living in Paris, France in the early 2000’s. Despite the decades separating them, their lives will, nonetheless, soon intersect and they will be connected forever. Sarah, along with her family, is rounded up by the French police, along with more than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children who are arrested and detained in the Veldrome d’Hiver, a stadium in the center of Paris, in the cruelest of conditions. Before they arrive, Sarah is separated from her little brother in what feels like the best-intentioned child’s play and love. The story follows Sarah and her family and what happens to them. We also learn about Julia Jarmond, a writer, mother and wife, living in modern-day Paris and about her life. This story is a good reminder that life doesn’t have a beginning and an end, but rather, is a long series of events experienced by one person and, sometimes, continued and carried on by their ancestors.

It must be very difficult to write historical fiction well because you have to juggle presenting history accurately with writing a good story. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, one will overshadow the other. This is what happened in this story. What happened in France during the war was so profoundly horrendous, the lives of innocent children, men and women taken and destroyed in the most brutal of ways, that when you put a mundane life of trying to fix a broken marriage, manage a job and parenting, this modern-day story pales in comparison. I didn’t find Julia particularly appealing and kept finding myself wondering about what happened to Sarah and her family.

After reading this book, I did some research about what happened to the children of the Velodrome d’Hiver. It is inconceivable to me that 4,051 young children would have been rounded up with their families, housed in this space without water or food, only to be brutally separated from their mothers and then transported by train with strangers only to be murdered in concentration camps (they didn't stand in the selections lines, they went directly to the gas chambers). I’m not sure my heart can recover from this one. This real-life horror story, I think, should have been enough for de Rosnay to build a fictional story around.