Sarah's Key

I have a love/hate relationship with literature concerning the Holocaust. I grew up as a practicing Reform Jew, meaning I attended Hebrew school at least twice a week, put my time in on the high holidays. Throughout those Wednesday and Sunday sessions at religious school, I had the history of WWII presented to me again and again. Through documentaries, textbooks, poetry. I do not say this in contempt of my teachers or Rabbis – on the contrary, I respect their need to ensure that Jewish youth is fully informed about their history. But studying the Holocaust again and again, year after year, can get repetitive. Tragedy. Despair. Genocide. European names, impossible to pronounce, photos of emaciated corpses or piles of abandoned shoes. After a certain point, it stops being painful. Then, it stops being much of anything at all. It becomes a lesson, difficult and heavy, like trigonometry. Something that we have to learn in order to earn our grades. We begin to lose sight of the individual parables.

Every so often, something comes along that draws my attention to a specific chapter of the massive Holocaust historical volumes. The Pianist, a movie I saw with the remarkable Rabbi Sara and a friend my junior year of high school. A performance by my mother’s incredible organization that honors musicians suppressed by the Holocaust, the Music Reborn Project. And now, a book, published in 2007, that reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Sarah’s Key is not a Holocaust story in your typical sense. The main plotline takes place in 2002. It is based mostly in Paris, France, nowhere near the haunting scenery of Germany or Poland. And, perhaps the most unexpectedly redeeming detail for me, our heroine Julia is not Jewish. She doesn’t claim to be an expert about the Holocaust. We travel this journey of enlightenment with her from start to finish, seeing how it affects her every step of the way. With a storyline so removed from the dramatic and over-exposed events of the early 1940’s, author Tatiana De Rosnay is free to explore the Holocaust in an unconventional way.

Julia was born in America. A tall, slim blonde reeking of her Boston upbringing, she is still known as “the American”, even after living with her French husband in Paris for close to 25 years. Julia’s husband, Bertrand, is like a giant inflated parody of a Frenchman. Impeccably dressed, irresistibly handsome, viciously condescending and cocky. He and Julia rock back and forth between the patronizing and the passionate in a marriage seemingly based on all the wrong things. For her job, Julia is assigned a piece on the “great roundup at the Veldrome d’Hiver” (or, as it is called throughout the book, Vel’d’Hiv’). Eager for an escape from her tense marriage, Julia throws herself into her research, discovering more than just the dates and figures she expected.

In July of 1942, the French police gathered thousands of Jewish families and forced them into Veldrome d’Hiver, an indoor stadium in Paris. They were kept there in sordid conditions for a few days, until they could be shipped out to labor camps across Europe. Most were sent to Auschwitz. Women were separated from their children and transported separately. Thousands of children were murdered without question, not by the Nazis, but by the French police. But at first, Julia knows none of this. Information on Vel’d’Hiv’ is not easy for her to find. The French have hidden the event in the back of their historical closets, behind their housecoats and their old wedding dresses, hoping that it will be forgiven and forgotten. Again and again Julia is scolded or turned away as she tries to gather information about the roundup, and the role that France played in the genocide of World War II. But eventually, pebbles of information begin to fall, loosening larger stones, eventually causing a massive landslide of history and emotion more complex and personal than could have she had ever imagined. She begins to question the people of France, both those that turned the other way during the Vel’d’Hiv and those that live, completely unaware of the event, today. The further she delves into her research, the more removed she becomes from her adamantly French husband and in-laws. Only her daughter Zoe, born of a French father and an American mother, seems an ally.

As Julia’s story progresses, a parallel plot unfolds. Even as Julia begins to learn more about the Vel’d’Hiv, ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski is waking up in early July 1942, about to experience it firsthand. The French police wake her family up in the night, demanding that they pack their bags and leave their home. Sarah’s parents have not prepared her for the situation; they have decidedly ignored her questions about the yellow star sewn onto her clothes, about the odd signs and behavior toward the city’s Jews. So she has no way of knowing that once they are taken, they will not be able to return; of knowing that she should refuse when her four-year-old brother requests to be left behind, locked into their secret hide-and-seek cabinet deep within the closet. “The girl could see her brother’s small face peeking out at her from the darkness. He had his favorite teddy bear clutched to him, he was not frightened anymore. Maybe he’d be safe there, after all. […] Maybe she should leave him there for the moment…She would come back to get him later in the day when they were allowed to go home again. ‘Are you afraid in there?’ she said softly, as the men called out for them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid. You lock me in. They won’t get me.’” Sarah locks her baby brother into the closet with a flashlight, a storybook, and a small flask of water. She promises that she will come back for him later that day and then follows her family from the apartment, holding the key to the secret cabinet in her pocket.

It is with this heartbreaking mistake that Sarah’s life is pulled completely out from beneath her feet. And, with it, Julia’s. De Rosnay takes us skillfully back and forth from 1943 to 2002, blending Sarah’s journey back to her brother seamlessly into Julia’s steps towards understanding the horrific events that took place in the city that she calls her home. The two stories strain towards their respective pinnacles until suddenly, Sarah’s story crashes full force into Julia’s. The apartment that Julia and Bertrand have inherited from Bertrand’s grandparents is the same home that Sarah left long ago after locking her brother into the closet. The two women become connected, despite the sixty-year separation. As she becomes obsessed with Sarah’s struggle, Julia discovers that she is pregnant. Middle-aged and with a husband approaching fifty, she considers it a miracle. Bertrand sees it as a horrible mistake. He tries to push her into terminating the pregnancy, stating that the baby will be “the end of us.” Even as the weight of the death of thousands of Jewish children ignored by the country that betrayed them settles onto Julia’s shoulders, she has to consider aborting her second child.

Many authors attempt to weave multiple storylines together into one compelling novel. And in my opinion, most of them fail. Like the meager Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, most stories end up with a limping sort of footprint, putting far more effort or meaning into one character’s plight than the other. But De Rosnay nurtures both Julia and Sarah, and under her care, both characters become almost impossibly three dimensional and real. My heart aches for Julia as she realizes that the doors this journalistic project has opened can never again be closed, and that the changes they have caused in her life cannot be undone. How many times have we all wished that we could reseal Pandora’s Box?

It may seem as though, at this point, I’ve given away most of the plot of the book. But somehow, I’ve taken you less than halfway. Sarah’s Key continues, revelation after dramatic revelation, through its final pages. De Rosnay delivers so many page-turning surprises that it’s easy to forget that the basis of the book is a historical event whose outcome was long ago decided. On the other hand, there are certain aspects of Sarah’s Key that seem impossibly coincidental. But De Rosnay balances these karmic gifts with unexpected pitfalls, for a serious edge-of-your-seat effect. Although it falls into cliché dramatics at times, the book is a poignant mixture of history and fiction, with equal parts social and personal moral responsibility. There are flashes of themes like female empowerment, cause and effect, and journalistic integrity. Sarah’s Key becomes so much more than just another book about the Holocaust. Here, in my opinion, is a best seller that deserves its reputation.

I am equal parts satisfied and horrified that new stories so graphic and personal are still being written about the Holocaust. Like the Parisians in Sarah’s Key, I can’t seem to decide whether I would rather WWII’s gruesome events be soothed and put away or publicly mourned. Sarah’s Key leaves the reader wondering – is it better to leave the past in the past? Or do we owe it to ourselves to constantly relive it with the hopes that this will have a healing effect, or at least stop history from repeating itself? Whichever side you take, De Rosnay tells an important story in Sarah’s Key. A modern tale of woman’s need for independence and confidence, of the importance of understanding one’s actions, even if they are mistakes. And a story of the past, in which she sheds light on a not yet over-played melody from the Holocaust – that of the Jewish children of France, who, up until now, haven’t had a chance to publicly speak.