Tatiana de Rosnay - Sarah's Key

Review by Ro Bennett on show 8th Sept 2011

This book shocked me. I have done a lot of research into Jewish History and the Holocaust - but this book shone a spotlight on horrendous events in France I had previously been unaware of.

I was browsing through the New York Times Best Seller list and looked up Sarah’s Key in ibooks. The next moment I had downloaded it and that was that - the rest of Sunday I sat and read it because it was so gripping. I had to record the programmes I had planned to watch on TV that evening and I stayed up late reading until I had finished it.

Sarah's Key is a dual story told from both a pre and post war perspective. In 2002 Julia Jarmond, an American journalist married to a Parisian is assigned to investigate the Vel' d'Hiv for the 60th anniversary of a dark moment in French history that many, including her husband, would prefer to forget.


The operation, cynically code named Spring Breeze was conducted in Nazi-occupied Paris, not by the Germans but by the French police; using French trains to cart Jewish families to their deaths. During the Nazi decreed raid and mass arrest in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942, 13,152 victims were arrested and held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver an indoor cycle track and the Drancy internment camp nearby, then shipped by railway transports to Auschwitz for extermination.


Sarah's Key is written with parallel chapters. We are drawn into two intertwining stories, the first, that of Sarah, a 10 year old girl who experiences these horrific events and the second, contemporary story, that of Julia Jarmond.


There had been a rumour that Jewish men were going to be arrested and deported, so Sara’s father is hiding in the cellar when the French police hammer on the door demanding that the family pack a few essentials and leave immediately. Whilst frantically packing, Sarah’s mother tells her to dress her terrified four year old brother. Sarah, too young to understand the situation, manages to lock her little brother in a cupboard "for his own safety" so that he is not part of the transportation. She assumes that they’ll be back home soon and that meanwhile their dad will come and let him out as soon as the coast is clear. However, as they are dragged outside, the mother screams her husband’s name, he comes out of hiding to be taken with his family. Much of the ensuing tension of the first part of the book rests on the question of whether she will be able to escape and if she will succeed in being reunited with her brother. That’s why it is a page turner!

Julia’s involvement with Sarah’s story begins when she discovers that the property which she and her husband are renovating and where her father in law grew up had previously belonged to a Jewish family who had been transported. She wants to know who the family were and what happened to them and her investigations lead her to uncover the plight of Sarah and her family.

It’s a riveting book, heart wrenching and thought provoking.

Incidentally in 1995, French President Jacques Chirac apologized for the complicit role that French policemen and civil servants served in the raid.