Sarah's Key

Book: Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay
Pages: 293
Finished: April 2009
Challenges:
**Spring Reading Thing
** A-Z Challenge
** New Author Challenge
** 9 for 2009
** Read & Review
** 20 in 2009
** War Through the Generations

First sentence: "The girl was the first to hear the loud pounding on the door."

Last sentence: " Till we felt our eyes could meet again, without the tears."

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself.


This book had me at page one. It was startling, staggeringly heartbreaking, and beautifully written. The destruction of innocence, of love, of trust brought me to tears. The story is told back and forth between the past and present in alternating chapters, which is a very effective technique. There are so many themes in this book- but what I found interesting was the competing themes of hopelessness and hopefulness.

I find myself drawn to WWII books, fiction and non-fiction alike, about this time each year. It is important to me that these books get read, that the stories and people in them are not forgotten and that history is not revised or rewritten. By forgetting we do not honor those who tragically lost their lives-were murdered-and we crack the door open to possibly allow it to happen again.

What else can I say? Nothing, except, you must read it.