Julia Jarmond is an American journalist, living in Paris and married to a Frenchman. She is assigned to write about the 60th commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv. Never heard of it? Neither had the Fab 5. Nor many others, according to Sarah's Key, a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay..
On July 16, 1942, French police, on orders from the Gestapo, rounded up 10,000 Jewish people, including children, from the Paris area. They were brought to the Velodrome d'Hiver, an indoor stadium, where they were held for six days while more and more people were packed in. Terrible heat, little food and no facilities made it unbearable. From there they were shipped out to camps, eventually ending at Auschwitz.
Julia learns about this atrocity, but at the same time she learns the story of one of those individuals--Sarah, a young girl who suffered an extra tragedy when she was taken from her home during the roundup. Julia is dealing with personal problems of her own, and Sarah's story makes her look at everything in her life in a new light.
This book does a great job of introducing us to the event itself, to the people who suffered through it, and to both the profound effect on survivors as well as the wish to ignore or forget the event on the part of those who watched it happen.
None of us could stand Julia's husband. If an American had written this, we'd assume she doesn't really like French people, but she is, in fact, French. Having Julia be an American, always on the outside regardless of how long she'd been in France, was a nice parallel to how Jewish people may have experienced the cultures they lived in during World War II.
Some of us found it frustrating that the novel flips back and forth from Sarah's story to Julia's modern-day life. Just when we'd get into one, we'd switch back to the other. However, we wonder if we could stand to read Sarah's story straight through--it's just so sad. Julia's story gave us a way to enter the story, some distraction, and a taste of the way France looked at the event 60 years later. And Julia faces some questions about the value of life in her own world as well as in history.
Whenever we read these stories, we can't help but wonder what we'd do if faced with the decision to put ourselves at risk for someone else. Would we endanger our children to hide someone? We'd like to think we are brave enough, but it's hard to be sure.
Are things like this happening now? There are, to some extent, similarities in what America did with Japanese internment camps and Native American reservations--people of a certain ethnicity taken from their homes and put into prescribed areas with little or no resources. It's possible to look at detention centers for illegal immigrants in the same way--basically, they are imprisoned indefinitely and, according to some reports, treated poorly. It happens where we can't see it, has nothing to do with us, and is therefore not our problem.
Sarah's Key is a good, sad novel that manages to keep the reader while telling an "old" tale and giving a fresh perspective on it. Never forget.
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