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Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is one of those books that just makes you shudder, it is so heartbreaking.  In this fictionalized account, on July 16, 1942, the French police arrest more than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children in the middle of the night.  Thinking that because they were in the hands of the French police rather than the German Gestapo, ten-year old Sarah locks her little four year old brother in a cupboard assuming that she will be back shortly to let him out.  It’s their secret hiding place and nobody will find him.  It’s better for him to be safe there rather than to be scared of the police.  Sarah and her parents are sent to Vel d’Hiv, a indoor stadium in the middle of a upper middle class neighborhood.  For six days they must submit to the most horrific conditions.  It’s hot, they are given no food, no toilet facilities, and many people are dying all around them.

Realizing both theirs and the little boys dire predicament, Sarah and her parents beg the authorities to let them out to rescue him.  But it’s no use.  They are sent to a work camp and from there all the parents are ripped apart from their children and sent straight to Auschwitz.  Sarah as well as babies, toddlers, and young children are literally left to fend for themselves.  Sarah’s only thought is to escape and return back to Paris to let her little brother out of the locked cupboard.

Sarah’s Key is told in alternating time periods.  We also read of Julia Jarmond, a journalist who sixty years later is assigned to write a piece on the Vel d’Hiv commemoration.  As an American living in Paris for more than 20 years, she knows nothing of this piece of history and soon realizes that many Parisians don’t either.  As she gets deeper into her research she discovers that the very home in which they are remodeling once belonged to a family who was rounded up on July 16th, 1942 as part of the Vel d’Hiv roundup.

Julia’s present collides with the past.  What happened to Sarah and her family?  Are they still alive?  What’s their story?  And what happened to the little boy locked in the cupboard?  And why is her husband’s family so secretive about the whole thing?  What do they know that they are not telling her?

I loved the structure of Sarah’s Key, that is, right until about halfway through the book, Sarah’s story ends and Julia’s story took over.  I understood why this happened.  But I loved Sarah’s story the best and was sad to have it end.  I could have been happy to have all Sarah and no Julia.  I also think the book needed to end a good 50 pages before it did.  All the strings got wrapped up a little too well.

But having said that, I loved Sarah’s Key.  It’s books like this one that make me read long into the night.  I couldn’t put it down.  It’s haunting.  How in the world can people treat each other the way they do?  It’s shocking.  I don’t think I will ever forget Sarah’s little brother.  It’s a story that I’ll never forget.

Links of interest:  Sarah’s Key website, more blogger reviews.
Genre:  Historical Fiction/Literary Fiction
Publisher:  St. Martin’s Griffin.  September 30, 2008
Paperback, 320 pages.  ISBN:  0312370849
Sarah’s Key is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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