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.

Sarah Starzynski’s story is told in chapters alternating from her experiences in July 1942 with a journalist’s investigations in 2002. The journalist, Julia Jarmond, discovers that her husband’s grandparents moved into the Starzynskis' rue de Saintonge apartment in late July or early August 1942.

Sarah and another girl manage to escape from Beaune-la-Rolande. They were helped by a French couple although Sarah’s companion dies of diphtheria soon after. Julia traces Sarah from France to New York City in 1952, to a wedding to her death in a car accident to a son, who has no knowledge of his mother’s life in France.

In telling the story from this split perspective of different times with different relationships to the events of the Vel d’Hiv, de Rosnay does a magnificent job of showing both the tragic personal toll of the event as well as the cultural fabric that permitted the events to occur.

When Julia is first assigned to write the story of the 60th anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv, she finds younger colleagues have no idea what happened. The velodrome itself was torn down in 1959. Books about the event are hard to get; photographs virtually nonexistent.

While Sarah ends a journal she kept after the war with the words, Zakhor, Al Tichkah (Remember, never forget), Julia's husband’s family, the Tézacs, are divided about the value of remembering the past. Some members feel it is unnecessary. Others have not gone a day without remembering the intersection of Sarah’s family and their own.

For Sarah, the memories are ultimately unendurable. For Julia, her father-in-law Edouard, her daughter Zoë, and Sarah’s son William Rainsferd, remembering offers the hope that the past need never be repeated.

The 2009 movie version of the book starring Kristin Scott Thomas as Julia Jarmond and directed and co-scripted by Gilles Paquet-Brenner is a powerful rendition more faithful than not to the book. It is at its best portraying the events of 1942, which cinematographer Pascal Ridao shot using a handheld camera.

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About the Author: Tatiana de Rosnay (1961 - )

Born in a suburb of Paris, Tatiana de Rosnay has Brtish, French and Russian ancestry. Her maternal grandfather, Gladwyn Jebb was the former Secretary-General of the United Nations. Her paternal grandfather was painter Gaëtan de Rosnay.

After working as a press officer, a journalist and a literary critic for a psychology magazine, she began writing novels. Since 1992, she has published 12 novels in French and six in English. Sarah's Key was published in 2007 and it became her most popular novel.

In 2011, Le Figaro magazine published a ranking of the top 10 most read French authors, listing de Rosnay at fifth position.