Sarah's Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay
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Book Reviews of Sarah's Key
Book Review: "Shame on us all for not having stopped it."
Summary: 4 Stars
"Sarah's Key," by Tatiana de Rosnay, is the heartrending fictional account of a disgraceful episode in French history. In July of 1942, more than six thousand French policemen who were in league with their Nazi occupiers, rounded up 13,152 Jews (including over four thousand children) and brought them to the Vélodrome d'Hiver (an indoor stadium where bicycle races had once taken place) before sending them off first to local camps and later to Auschwitz to be gassed. "In the end, France sent nearly eighty thousand Jews to the death camps." One of the detainees brought to the Vélodrome with her parents is ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a bright and sensitive little girl who, before she learns the bitter truth, consoles herself with the fantasy that her family will go home shortly. She has a very important reason for wanting to get back to Paris as quickly as possible. However, as the days pass with no indication that her captors will set her free, Sarah becomes increasingly desperate to escape.
In 2002, Julia Jarmond (the first person narrator), is forty-five. She is an American from Massachusetts who lives in Paris with her "impossibly attractive" but aggressive and controlling husband, forty-seven year old Bertrand Tézac, and their precocious eleven-year-old daughter, Zoe. Julia is assigned to write about the sixtieth anniversary of the 1942 tragedy for a weekly magazine "Seine Scenes." Although she has lived in France for twenty-five years, fifteen of those married to Bertrand, Julia had known very little about the tragic fate of the French Jews. She is sickened to learn that non-Jewish men and women, who had once been the friends and neighbors of the Jews, either looked the other way or enthusiastically collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. Later, Jarmond discovers a personal link with the Starzynski family that will change her life profoundly. As Julia says, "It awakened a vulnerability within me, triggered something deep, unspoken, that haunted me...."
The brief and starkly written chapters in which Sarah narrates her experiences are excruciatingly painful. Rosnay depicts an innocent child's confusion and terror when she suspects that she and her fellow Jews are being sent to their deaths. Rosnay is less successful when she describes Julia's inner torment and conflicts with her husband. Bertrand is a stock character--a self-absorbed and arrogant bully whom it is all too easy to loathe. In fact, it is difficult to understand why Julia has put up with him all of these years. As the book progresses, the author introduces other unlikely plot twists that enable her to hammer home her theme repeatedly. Bertrand smugly declares, "Nobody cares anymore. Nobody remembers." He is wrong. The descendants of the millions of Jews who died in France and across Europe as well as righteous people of all religions and races most certainly do care and remember. "Sarah's Key" is moving and enlightening, but it would have been even more effective had the story been more a bit more subtle, understated, and nuanced.
Book Review: Lend an ear to those who survived to tell; shed a tear to wash away their pain
Summary: 4 Stars
Sarah, a ten year old girl locked her young brother, Michel, in a cupboard in order to hide him from the French police. Soon after, on July 16, 1942, she and her parents were arrested during the Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup. With the complicity of the French State, thousands of Jewish Families were initially held in the Velodrome, and then moved first to internment camps within France and eventually to Auschwitz, in Poland.
While detained at the Velodrome, Sarah managed, with the help of a French compassionate policeman, to escape. A farmer hid her. During all this time Sara kept the key of the cupboard and never ceased to think about her little brother. She felt guilty that her brother was languishing and perhaps dying in that confinement. Eventually, she ventured to go back to her parents' apartment, occupied by a new tenant, where she found her little brother's decomposed body.
I had been subjected to Nazis' brutality. I experienced and witnessed Nazis' looting, expropriating, deporting, mocking, beating, torturing, shooting, hanging, babies choked or smashed to death, starving and other unimaginable acts of extreme wickedness carried out against innocent men, women and children. Like Sarah, I had asked what I and my parents have done to deserve to be subjected to so much suffering. I know that Sarah's described tribulations could most definitely have happened. Shockingly, the French Police collaborated with the Germans and most people around were indifferent to the ongoing persecution of their Jewish neighbors.
It is very troubling reading how people have no interest in the Holocaust legacy. When Julia asked her husband: "Betrand, when you were at school were you taught about the Vel' d'Hiv'?. His answer was "No idea" It is not something most people want to read about.... Nobody cares anymore. Nobody remembers."
The author's note states "the characters in Sarah's Key novel are entirely fictitious. But several of the events described are not." The reader wonders which episode is fictitious and which is factual. Sara's life experience as narrated is probable. It should be classified as a memoir or biography. The events enveloping her life contributes to the readers' knowledge about the Holocaust legacy. The minutiae of Julia's life, her marital problems and romances, merits a separate novel. The juxtaposition of these two stories is sometimes distracting. Nevertheless, the book is riveting; it is very well written and expansively researched. Sarah's Key will break your heart finding out how wicked some French had acted during WWII. Reading about Sarah's torment thinking about her brother, tears were streaming down my face. It also warmed my heart reading about some people's kindness and sacrifices to help and save Sarah's life.
Book Review: An emotional Holocaust tale, but falters towards the end
Summary: 3 Stars
"Sarah's Key" is a work of fiction by Tatiana de Rosnay. Although the characters within Rosnay's book are fictional, the background for her story is base on a real life occurrence. The novel is 320 page long.
*GENERAL THEME SPOILER* (no specific details given)
A story in two parts, told in an alternating and sequential format.
1.) In July 1942, in Nazi-occupied Paris, Jews were continuing to be gathered for deportation. This tale deals with one such story as it follows 10 year old Sarah Starzynski and her family during their ordeal with what was to become later known as the Velodrome d'Hiver round-up...one of France's darkest humanitarian events of WW II. Memorable in itself, yet easily forgotten by most of the populous because it was ordered by the then Vichy government and carried out by French policemen.
2.) In 2002, Parisian journalist Julia Jarmond, is assigned to cover the sixtieth anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv round-up and in doing so, discovers not only many forgotten facts but also several older people who had personal recollections of this horrific event and in particular with Sarah and her family. And shockingly to Ms. Jarmond, some of these people are very close to her in real life. Thus the quest for Sarah's tale begins.
*END SPOILER*
This is at times a very sobering and emotional story, replete with all the cruelty that once again demonstrates man's inhumanity to man. Sarah's tale is a testimony to perseverance under truly trying times. The reader will have no difficulty feeling her fear, her guilt and her overwhelming sense of sisterly love, loyalty and responsibility for her younger brother.
And yet, for all the wonderful writing and intrigue found in the first two-thirds of this book, I was disappointed with the remainder. Once Sarah's story ended, the book seemed to focus more on Julia's own personal agenda. There came a point that I found myself wishing the tale had ended. I had the feeling that the author was trying to do too much...that somehow she overshot her true ending. The last part of the book seemed to me somewhat contrived and scripted, and because of this the entire book lost some of it's intangible magic.
Conclusion:
A tale of the Holocaust that was emotionally and beautifully written. The pacing for the first two-thirds was superb. A story that was truly sad, and yet in ways, sadly true when one reflects back on some of the atrocities that occurred in Nazi-occupied Europe of the 1940s. Unfortunately a weak and somewhat disappointing ending. 3 1/2 Stars
Ray Nicholson
Book Review: Beautiful tears hide true nature of this work.
Summary: 1 Stars
I don't believe this book. Nor tears of people who read this book either. While its' important to know the historical facts, this book is all about author's and/or her creation Julia's pride, sentiments, and self-satisfaction rather than Jewish family itself. Among them, I felt her pride most. Beautiful tears hide true nature of this work. I wish there was more weight on Jewish people on this book, but I don't believe this author was capable of doing it. It's too much about "me" Julia. And the author couldn't resist showing it.
And maybe, I realized afterwards, that was why, I had problem seeing the things through Sarah's eyes where it's intended to be read that way. I beleive all the details of terrible events described here are based on, or something very close to what acctually happened, but I felt Sarah was somewhere far, and not real at all. I first thought the writer was not skilled enough, and it still might be a part of it, but now I believe it is mainly because the writer wanted show herself more, saying, "I am a good person, and I did a great job", wearing a mask of an american. And that is why Julia is much more realistic than Sarah, I think.
Moreover, at one point I felt like I wanted to see more of Sarah so badly, she suddenly disappears from pages. I guess it's because Sarah is only important for Julia to make her feel good about herself, no more no less. She seems care less about Jewish people than she tries to look. The novel tells itself.
This is important work, but I don't like this kind of presentation.
I live in Boston, no american, no french, nor have relationship with Jewish famly, but I felt a little anger inside me after reading this. Why this book have to be so much about the Journalist? I let Julia cry and I don't care a bit. I am not going to be moved by tears of american or french, whatever. They can cry all the way through the ends, and I don't care a bit. I care more about Jewish people who acctually suffered, or so I wish to be that way myself, and if I ever write a book about it, I would never say "I care so much about these people!" out loud just like this author did.
You need modesty.
Showing tears simply don't do the job.
I only know a few fiction books that describe the suffering of Jewish people in at least some parts of their storylines, and Beach Music by Pat Conroy is one of them. If I read a fiction, I prefer something like that, a more modest approach. But I have to admit I don't know much about it, too.
I like to read good documentaries or good novels, not like this one.
Book Review: Profoundly Shocking Story of a Young French Girl in the Holocaust
Summary: 5 Stars
Tatiana deRosnay has given us one of the most beautifully constructed and heartfelt books I've ever had the pleasure (and pain) of reading. Told in alternating chapters by Sarah in 1942 and Julia in 2002, this remarkable story is based on facts surrounding the role of France and its citizens during the Holocaust. The country's unspeakable part in this tragedy is not a focal point for students, but this book should certainly be told and studied so that the horrible story of the Vel d'Hiv, the roundup of French citizens who were Jews, never has a chance to repeat itself.
Sarah is ten years old when she hears the French police pounding on the door of her parents' Paris apartment. She knew that her parents had been worried and that Papa had taken to sleeping in the basement, but nothing prepared her for the atrocities she was about to endure. Always very protective of her four-year old brother, Michel, she starts to get him ready to go with the police as ordered, but he is terrified and wants to hide in their secret place. Sarah agrees and locks him in the hidden cupboard, knowing he will be safe until she gets back to let him out. She hides the key and goes with her parents.
The reader can feel the sense of confusion and disbelief that overwhelms Sarah as she and her parents are transported to Drancy, a stopping point on the way to Auschwitz. The author writes with deep sympathy of the indignities inflicted on Sarah and the haunting parting as she is torn from her mother. Her one obsession is to get back to her apartment and let her brother out of the cupboard.
In alternating chapters, we are privy to the story of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist now living in France and married to a man whose family is inextricably connected to the torture that Sarah endures. Not in the way the reader might expect, but in a way that will finally explode after years of secrecy and leave the reader choked with grief as the words rip off the pages.
The reader also gets to know Julia and her arrogant husband. Her story revolves around her own disintegrating marriage being strangled by infidelity, her husband's insistence on her having an abortion, and, most importantly, her obsession with the story of the Vel d'Hiv and her tenacity in learning the rest of Sarah's story.
Haunting and unforgettable, this is an intimate and totally captivating story of one of the darkest periods in French history, actually in World History. DeRosnay has put a very personal face on an appalling tragedy, and the result is stunning.