Sarah’s Key
by Tatiana De Rosnay
St. Martin’s Griffin 2007
Imagine that you are a 10 year-old girl living joyfully with your family in Paris (Sirkah, or Sarah). It is 1942. Your father is hiding from the Nazis and the Vichy French police. Fists pound on your door. Your own Frenchmen take you and your mother away, as your father leaves his hiding place to be with you. Your little brother hides in your secret place. You take his key promising to return. You escape from the detention camp. Your parents go to Aushwitz. You have the key to your brother’s secret place. What would you do?
This wonderful story is told from the perspective of an American woman living in Paris with her thoroughly French husband and a daughter about the age of Sarah. Our heroine Julia is a reporter assigned to do a story on the 60th anniversary of the Velodrome d’Hiv, where the Jews were incarcerated and then dispatched. She discovers that her in-laws moved into Sarah’s apartment. Long buried memories of her father-in-law who found the remains of the boy focus the reporter on the story, which leads her on the quest to find Sarah.
Julia has a wandering husband and a new baby surprise as she embarks on the mystery.
Ms. De Rosnay spins an emotional story of the journey to find Sarah, and, perhaps, a new life. The history of the French entombment of their own people is a shameful period of French history. Each of us can imagine how we would react on any side of such a gruesome situation. Would we be cowards or heroes, victims or survivors? Each of these stories is told in Sarah’s Key.
This wonderfully written story is an emotional thriller. It will trigger introspection in you about how lucky you are, or how you need to move forward in your own life.
Warms, Cym
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