Paris, July 1942 and Paris, May 2002: sixty years since the French police roundup of thousands of Jewish families retained in the Velodrome d’Hiver where famiilies were separated and sent to Auschwitz. The event, commonly called the Vel’ d’Hiv, is twicetold between ten-year-old Sarah who thought she was safely hiding her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, their hiding place, expecting to return to save him, safely guarding the key to the cupboard within her pocket, and Julia Jarmond, American journalist assigned to cover the sixtieth anniversary commemoration, finally opening the French national consciousness and that of her restrained in-laws, to begin a painful healing process.
ADDITIONAL INFO: The book is written as a tribute to the children who never came back, and to those who survived. The Velodrome d’Hiver no longer exists but was in the heart of Paris.
RATING: * * * * Very, very good
Reviewed by: cb
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Thank you very much for reviewing my book “Sarah’s Key” so favourably on your website.
Merci !
TR
It took me 12 hours today to read this great book in its Spanish version and at the end I was crying… remembering my own family. Thanks very much for this book because I think it could be useful for French people and for everyone who is really interesting on learning about the human tragedy. The Sarah’s key will be reference about the children suffering from now and them.
Please give me congratulations to this great and fresh writer.
Yours,
As a freshman college student, I first learned of the Holocaust in 1960 through reading Life Magazine’s reports of Anne Frank. Why hadn’t it been taught to us in school, I wondered. In “Sarah’s Key” ( I read it in five hours, could not put it down) Julia Jurmond’s response was the same as mine: why wasn’t the roundup of Vel d’ Hiv, taught in school? My thanks to author Tatiana de Rosnay for bringing the events to light; the novel is not only brilliant and memorable, it is a long overdue tribute to the Jews of Paris, 1942.