Book Review: Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

The nonfiction book is my shepherd through history. But a novel rescues like a big brooding St. Bernard from desert monotony or the mirage of the mundane. Let’s face it: in this over-heated summer of discontent we need a break for a few days. Avid readers often run for the romance novel or the latest sci-fi blockbuster. But for this reviewer I need Europe pre-war/World War II where I can peer over stone walls into lives of uncertainty. I can’t get my fill of facts of life in private homes and the everyday of peasants to city people to ghetto dwellers who inhabited the late 1930s to the mid 1940s Western Europe. So I keep looking for books on the subject.

To that end two books caught my fancy this summer: one a novel, Sarah’s Key, and the other a reconstructed autobiography, Not the Germans Alone: A Son’s Search for The Truth of Vichy by Isaac Levendel which I read concurrently. Both dealt with the French role in the Shoah: with the tools of the Vichy Government under 84-year-old Philippe Pétain or Marshal Pétain culminating in the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup — Vel’ d’Hiv for short where nearly 100,000 immigrant French Jews and French Nationals of Jewish origin were rounded up in a huge, now razed, stadium, moved to Drancy and sent to a final destination: the ovens of Auschwitz. Transports from France differed from other ghettos transports in that they went directly to the gas showers and the crematorium.

De Rosnay has a vested interest in France, where she lives with her husband and two children, as an established European novelist/writer; however, her original manuscript, a novel about a French girl born in France to Jewish immigrant parents caught up in the Vel’d’hiv with a secret, was initially rejected. The author persisted, and Sarah’s Key is now a major motion picture, a wonderful published novel and audio-book about a family in France fingered by the Vichy government and rounded up. French families caught in this waiting ghetto like those in Polish ghettos dare not go beyond the pale. And when Sarah realizes that her family will not return in time for dinner after the roundup, she frets secretly over locking her brother in a hidden closet. Sarah cannot go beyond the pale, which in this case are bolted doors of Vel' d'Hiv and posted guards. She begs; she cajoles — but will she get out in time and what will she find when she gets back to her brother?

Article Author: Heloise

Author, writer, teacher, blogger, keeps a blog The Trough where she writes. She combines spirituality and politics as no other. She is a native of Chicago, who prefers walking as exercise. The author has a B.S., biology and M.A., anthropology, certified science and french teacher.
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