A Different Look at the Holocaust: Sarah's Key

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.

Fab 5 Part 2: Night Time

Last night the Fab 5 Book Club met in the new home of one of our members. It is a beautiful home, especially since they have painted almost every surface already in the 2 months they've owned it. Of course, we all had to take a moment to bemoan the state of our homes and their respective needs for repainting, refinishing, etc. Nancy mentioned that her basement is looking more finished now that they have hung the 8 or so hunting trophies on the wall. I have to note here, this is true love talking. When I met Nancy, she was single, and I could never have imagined a day would come when she would say "the basement looks more finished now that we have hung up all the deer heads."

This was a lighthearted beginning, but the discussion for the night was anything but lighthearted. This month we read Night by Elie Wiesel. I suspect that many of you had to read it in college. I know many of my classmates did, but it was never required for any of my classes. What a book. It is not very long, and it reads quickly. It also leaves no room for relief.

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, went to Auschwitz at the age of 15. His narrative of this experience is horrifying and painful to read. He wrote this account 10 years after his liberation, as a young man, and he said "Never shall I forget those moments, which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust." And in reading the story, you have to wonder how he can even find the words to express it, how anyone can survive.

Yet Wiesel has been given the gift of grace. The version I read was a new translation from his original Yiddish text, and it included not only the original introduction, but also a preface written 45 years after the original publication, and the acceptance speech he made to the Nobel committee the year he won the prize for this book. He has somehow managed, not just to survive, but to find equilibrium with his God and to advocate for the oppressed everywhere.

We wonder what it means for modern generations to grow up knowing that people can do such things. We learn about the Nazi atrocities before we reach puberty. Though this in itself seems like an awful thing, it also helps young people understand the atrocities that continue in our world. Maybe if they can read such a narrative as teenagers they can have more empathy for those who suffer in far away countries, in a day when it is possible to turn the story off with one touch of a remote control.

Some of us in the group are cryers--it doesn't take much to set us off. So you can imagine what a book like this does to us. Barbara informed us that crying at night leads to red, puffy eyes in the morning (ditto for me), so she tries to get all her crying done on Friday nights. I can relate. My youngest child has begged me not to read in public places, because she is absolutely mortified if I cry there. She'll have to deal with it. I'm not likely to get control of the waterworks anytime soon, and I'm not giving up reading on airplanes or waiting rooms.

This book brings us to the end of our six months of planned reading. We have covered Little Bee by Chris Cleave, Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, The Hunger Games and Night. All but one of these deal with oppression in one way or another. We are getting to be very deep people, we think. When we don't get distracted by, well, anything.

Next month is our favorite time--book picking time. Normally we would have done this tonight, but we've decided to try giving ourselves a month to read whatever we want and report back. We'll also come with stacks of books to plan out the next six months, so if you have suggestions, we're takin' them. Nancy may be bringing back "The Alchemist," which is sort of the Susan Lucci of our book club. It's been up for election many times, but never quite makes it to the list. Anyone out there who thinks we should read it?