Sarah's Key, by Tatiana deRosnay (2007).
Sarah’s Key is two stories in one. One thread of the novel depicts the treatment of Jews by the French during the Holocaust; the other depicts the destruction of a marriage between an American woman and her French husband.
Sarah Starzynski was a 10-year old Jewish girl when the French police arrested her and her family during the Velodrome d’Hiver (known as Vel d’Hiv) on July 16, and 17, 1942. In 2002, middle aged Julia Jarmond is writing a story to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv.
Each chapter is very short and, for the most part, switches between Sarah’s story and that of Julia. Sarah is know as the “girl” for most of her story. Not giving people names was a way to depersonalize an individual. That was certainly how the Nazi’s treated the Jews.
When the French police knocked on her family’s door, Sarah’s younger brother crawled into his favorite hiding place, the cupboard, and Sarah locked him in with a promise that she would come for him soon. Little did she realize that she will not be able to return. Instead, she and her parents were brought to the Vel d’Hiv, where they were imprisoned with thousands of other Jews before being transported to concentration camps.
Sarah and another young girl named Rachel were able to escape. The ultimately came to the home of an elderly couple, Jules and Genevieve Dufaure, who took them in and cared for them. (Rachel became ill and died.) Sarah insisted on returning to Paris to find her brother. Against their better judgment, the couple brought her to her former home, which was now occupied by a French family. When Sarah opened the cupboard, all that remained was her brother’s corpse. The Dufaure’s took in Sarah and raised her as their grandchild.
Sixty years later, Julia and her husband move into the apartment that once belonged to his grandmother. As Julia begins her research on the Vel d’Hiv, she comes to realize that the apartment her husband’s family had moved into in July 1942, was one that had recently belonged to a deported Jewish family that had been a target of the Vel d’Hiv.
She persists in her inquiry about the source of her family’s apartment, but her husband is very blasé about the matter. Finally, her father-in-law confesses that he remembered the day when Sarah came an opened the cupboard to find her dead brother. It is a secret that his family had kept for years.
This is the turning point of the novel and we no longer see Sarah’s story from her perspective. The novel turns to Julia and her quest to find Sarah.
Julia becomes obsessed with finding Sarah. She was able to track her down through the Dufaure’s grandsons. As a young woman, Sarah left France and immigrated to the United States. Julia is able to find her family, but learns that Sarah had died many years earlier. Julia tells the Dufaure’s relatives that their ancestors were Righteous Gentiles for their protection and care of young Sarah.
The story’s flaw is when Julia finds herself pregnant at age 45. She thinks her husband will be thrilled with this news, but instead insists that she either abort the fetus or he will leave her. Julia is suddenly confronted how the French perceive Americans. This thread of the story seems to focus on stereotypes that detract from the main theme of active participation by some of the French to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.
Sarah’s Key is a beautiful story. It ties a young Jewish girl who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and a middle-aged gentile researching this horrific past together.
Read: July 27, 2010
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