Book Recommendations: Sarah’s Key

Erika Gonzales

In Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, the Nazis, who occupy half of a 1942 France, order the French police to seize Jewish families (an event that will later become known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup). Ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski awakens in the middle of the night to find French policemen knocking at her family’s door instructing everyone to pack their necessities and to come with them immediately. Sarah leaves with her mother and father, but not before locking her brother, Michel, in a secret cupboard in their apartment thinking she would come back for him soon.

This story alternates settings, presenting the reader with a Paris during July 1942 as well as one during May 2002 in which a journalist, Julia Jarmond, is assigned the task to write about the 60th anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, along the way she discovering family secrets that lead her to Sarah. As she investigates the horrors of the past, she reevaluates the present as her current perceptions of her family and Paris begin to change.

Although the plot of this novel and its characters are fictional, the portrayal of the evils experienced during the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup is very accurate. During the roundup, the French police sent Jewish families to the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d’Hiver, where 13,000 men, women, and children were held captive for two to three days without food, water, or sanitary conditions. Afterwards, more than 43,000 Jews were sent from France to concentration camps such as Drancy and Auschwitz, in which only 811 of them returned from after World War 2. When the war was over, France denied their role in this tragedy for 53 years. However, on July 16, 1995, President Jacques Chirac of France made a speech acknowledging their involvement.

The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup is an event in history that is under-commemorated by the world. This novel, while shining a light towards the forgotten past, also allows its readers to broaden their perception of the misery and scars war inflicts upon people from the past, present, and future.

Fans of historical fiction, this is definitely one for you.