Sarah's Key (novel)
French cover (2nd edition).
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| Author | Tatiana de Rosnay |
|---|---|
| Original title | Elle s'appelait Sarah |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Holocaust |
| Publisher | |
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Publication date
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September 2006 |
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Published in English
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12 June 2007 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 294 (sometimes 293) |
| ISBN | |
| 16 | |
Sarah's Key (French: Elle s'appelait Sarah) is a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, first published in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book. The first is that of ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, a Jewish girl born in Paris, who is arrested with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Before they go, she locks her four-year-old brother in a cupboard, thinking the family should be back in a few hours. The second plot follows Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, who is asked to write an article in honour of the 60th anniversary of the roundup.
The first plot follows the Starzynski family. On 16 July 1942, French police raided the Starzynski apartment in Paris, arresting ten-year-old Sarah and her parents. First, the family is sent to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, an enclosed stadium that housed a bicycling track for racing. The captors held more than 7,000 Jews, mostly women and children in the stadium, which was made to hold far fewer people, and they were eventually sent to Drancy, a refugee camp, to separate the men from the women and children and then later, they separated the mothers from the children. Later, we find out, they were all sent to Auschwitz. Sarah, now on her own, is still tormented by thoughts of her brother locked in the secret closet at home, and tries to escape with Rachel, another Jewish girl at the camp. They are caught, but the officer that catches them is a man that Sarah knows from her old life. She begs him to let her go to rescue her brother. He reluctantly helps them escape and even gives the two girls money. The girls find refuge with an elderly couple who takes them into their house, but Rachel falls ill with what is probably diphtheria or typhus fever. The couple, Jules and Geneviève Dufaure, are compelled to call a Nazi doctor, who reports to the Nazi officials that the elderly couple is hiding Jewish children. The Nazis arrive and search for more children, but without finding Sarah they take Rachel away and she presumably dies. Jules and Geneviève dress Sarah in boy's clothes (her hair had been cut short at Drancy) and help her get to her former home in Paris. She had been keeping the key to the closet in her pocket the whole time. She knocks at the door, screaming her brother's name. A young boy or Eduoard as a child (Bertrand's father) opens the door and Sarah rushes into the house, nearly kicking the door to her former room and quickly opens the closet. She collapses and starts to cry hysterically. The boy's father, or Edouard's father comes into the room and removes Michel from the closet and laid him on Edouard's bed, who had died by then (shriveled up), hidden in the closet waiting for Sarah.
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