Sarah's Key: Book Review

I've been on a reading spree this month, finishing Snow Crash (started last month), The Late, Lamented Molly Marx, and Sarah's Key.

Sarah's Key is a book with two intertwining stories narrated in parallel. One story, set in current time, follows Julia who is an American journalist in Paris. She has been living in Paris for 20 years and writes for a local newspaper with largely American following. Her latest assignment is to cover the events at Vel d'Hiv (an infamous roundup of Jews in Paris on July 16, 1942) on its 60th Anniversary. In doing so, she discovers many harrowing events which got buried over time, conveniently forgotten by a population seeking to distance itself from guilt. One of the stories in one of these extermination events, is that of Sarah's.

Sarah is a little girl in 1942, unaware of the growing anti-Semitic movement in France, when she and her parents are rounded up by French police (who are co-operating with the German forces) and taken to a huge velodrome, Vel d'Hiv. When the police come to their apartment, Sarah, in an attempt to protect her young brother, locks him in a secret cupboard in their room, pockets the key, and walks on to the velodrome thinking she will be back soon to free her brother from his hiding spot. With each passing day in unsanitary conditions, locked in the overheating velodrome, she feels hope slipping away.

The author traverses the two time lines smoothly and in a way that doesn't leave us frustrated. Sarah's story in itself is well conceived and well told. Julia's story begins convincingly, but becomes theatrical towards the end. Despite that, the book manages to keep its pace up, the characters believable and evolving. It *is* fiction, but the recounting of the events of Vel d'hiv is factual.

After reading the book, I went to see what Wikipedia had to say about Vel d'Hiv. There is quite a bit of information in there, but what got to me the most was the follow-up information on the French politicians and policemen who marched more than 13,000 Jews into internment (and then execution) on that one day. Wikipedia is written by contributors and not historians, but I'll go ahead and link the part that bothered me. The Aftermath. Of the main criminals who were to be tried for their involvement in the roundup, one fled to Spain, and France never requested extradition. One was sentenced but later pardoned by Charles de Gaulle. And quite a few of them seemed to have received what sounds like a simple slap on the wrist. "Bad boy! You shouldn't have killed that Jew! Sit in corner for a minute and then go home!". It took until 1995 for a French president (Chirac) to apologize for France's role in the Holocaust.

Reading this book also made me wonder what the media draw of the Holocaust is. Why are the books and movies compelling? Part of it seems to be that the basic story of the Holocaust has been written about enough that a book or a movie never has to educate you before telling a human-interest story. It can jump right into the meat. My second theory is that in reading about the pain and desperation of those who suffered, we ourselves experience a depth of emotion not readily available to us in our real lives. This somehow makes us feel more human, more empathetic, and somehow a better person for having been able to feel that pain. If you have another theory, share it with me!