Sarah's Key Review

These are the voiceless children. The silenced adults. The massacre that no one cared about. The Vel' d'Hiv victims were brushed off the shoulders of their own countrymen in World War II. On July 16 and 17, 1942, the French police began a roundup of 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children living in Paris. The families were kept in such appaling conditions at the Velodrome d'Hiver that the "only way to shut out the hell around [you] was to bury [your] head in [your] knees," (page 38). The sights seen in that stadium were enough to make you go mad. There were rotting bodies lying on the ground like sacks of limp bags of flour, and a constant fear clinging to the air. After being kept there for a few days, the families were sent to internment camps within France and finally sent to Auschwitz. The action was sanctioned by the Nazis but that level of coordination, identification, and organisation would only have been possible with the cooperation of French police and government officials. "None of them came back from Auschwitz," (Page 29).

In Tatiana de Rosnay's historically acurate depiction of these horrifying events in Sarah's Key, she manages to capture a loss of innocence and hope that is so hearbreaking it would make a British royal guard break out of character to cry. Rosnay paints the story of two separate stories that eventually overlap. One, of a 10 year old girl named Sarah, who was taken with her family on the night of the round up to the camps in France, but in a panic, locks her younger brother in their cupboard thinking he'll be safe there. Second, a modern day American Journalist living in France named Julia, who is determined to find out what happend to Sarah and her family. Through Rosnay's depiction, the audience painfully and sadly watches Sarah go from a sweet, innocent, golden-haried girl, into a beaten down, weak, shell of a little girl, who is capable of evil. This becomes extremely obvious when she changes dramatically at the camp. She had "become someone else. Someone hard, and rude, and wild. Sometimes she fought with the older children...she swore at them. She hit them. She felt dangerous, savage," (Page 80). Rosnay shows the journey of a girl who was once filled with hope, life and innocence, and slowly turns into a girl with no hope. No family. Nothing resembling childhood. Through Rosnay's descriptions of sadness, the audience sees how the French ripped away one of the greatest gifts in life, the gift of innocence.

Rosnay's use of sentence fragments is also unrivaled. It adds to the sadness and dramaticness of the story, as well as develops the characters. Her language is not too flowry. It's raw. It hits you to the core. Nothing is built up with sugar plums and unnecessary fluff. It's simply raw emotion. Her language also matches with Sarah's loss of innocence. At the beginning of the book her language was young, innocent and had an aura of childhood. But by the end of the novel, Sarah is talking like an adult. It is these things that make Sarah's Key a literary classic.

Another great quality of the book is that none of the characters are perfectly made. They all make mistakes. Julia is certainly not perfect and she makes several almost unforgiveable errors of judgement in the book. It added realism and more raw emotion to the book that sets the book a part from other historical fiction novels. In addition it also added a level of relatability. On that same note, Sarah, although her situation was unrelatable, her emotions were extremely relateable.

In conclusion, this book is a B+. I story was very interesting because of the parallel stories and the emotion conveyed, but it was almost too sad for me to get through it. The language is unrivaled to any book I've read, as well as the story itself and the historical accuracy, but I usually read books in other genres. Sarah's Key was a great read, that is jam packed with emotion, pure sadness, and loss of innocence.

Sarah's Key Trailer