Sarah’s Key

 By Tatiana de Rosnay

The event that turns the plot of Sarah’s Key is the July 16 and 17, 1942, mass arrests of Jewish men, women and children in Paris, and their detention in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris.

Decreed by the Nazis, the roundup was executed by French police, using Paris city buses and the “Winter Velodrome” bicycling racetrack and stadium built near the Eiffel Tower by Henri Desgrange, who later organized the Tour de France.

The Vél d’Hiv round up captured 13,152 victims – men, women and 4,051 children. There were no functioning lavatories and just one water tap. The limited food and water available was brought by Quakers, the Red Cross and the few doctors and nurses allowed to enter.

Five days later they were then taken to internment camps at Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers, and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz.

Ten Years Gone

by Jonathan Dunsky

Private investigator Adam Lapid is a former detective with the Hungarian police and a decorated soldier who served in the Negev Desert during Israel's War of Independence.

He is also a survivor of Auschwitz, struggling to survive post-war life in Tel Aviv. 

His nights are riddled with nightmares; his days haunted by ghosts; his soul heavy with losses and experiences he cannot share.

When a small, faded, thin woman -- Henrietta Ackerland -- asks for his help finding her son in July 1949, Lapid listens with a sinking heart. He feels, as vividly as he feels the scorching July heat, that this is a futile mission that will end in heart-break.