A Bookworm's Corner: Sifting through the Silence

Reading Tatiana de Rosnay’s “Sarah’s Key” is a lot like watching a car wreck between a tiny electric car and a 26,000 log trailer. You can see the corpses even before they metal scrunches like foil, but can’t force yourself to look away as a shadow slips from the wreckage, leaving any survivors in the truck’s cabin to wander out into the misty morning with lots of unanswered questions about what to do now. The same atmosphere of resigned misery, silent horror and clawing for something that must be the answer to all of life’s frustrations permeates the story that is split between two heroines tied by location and circumstance.

On July 16, 1942, 10-year old Sarah Starzynski wakes up to the French Police banging on her door. Believing that they’re looking for her father who is hiding in the basement, she acquiesces to her younger brother’s pleas to let him hide until they come back (because the local police aren’t the Germans, so nothing bad could possibly happen), and locks him in their secret cupboard, planning to leave the key with their concierge or a sympathetic neighbor. However, that is the beginning of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, the most infamous act of collaboration of the Vichy government with the Nazis. When Sarah’s father emerges from hiding, summoned by his wife’s cries, the girl is the only one who still believes that they will be back in time to unlock little Michel.

In Paris, 2002, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist is assigned the coverage of the Vel’ d’Hiv anniversary and suddenly finds that few are willing to talk about the incident and even fewer acknowledge France’s role in it. Even more pressing is her crumbling marriage with a man she’s not sure she ever loved and a new apartment inherited from her husband’s dying great-grandmother. It is from investigating the apartment’s origins that Julia finds out about the Starzynskis and begins to investigate Sarah’s fate and its link to her in-laws.

To be honest, I held my breath for quite a while for Julia and Bertrand to discover Michel’s corpse as they were renovating their new home. However, things became much more interesting as it became clear that someone in the family before them must have discovered it earlier. In a way, the Dan Brown-esque cliffhangers before the story switches between the two time periods convinced me to stay for the whole ride and get all the gruesome details. As Mary Schultz commented in “The Savage Pacer,” “‘Sarah’s Key’ grabbed a hold of me and didn’t let go till the last page. Everything else I did for those few days got in the way of reading.” I have to agree.

Luckily, de Rosnay manages to create characters that the reader cares about, even if some points of Julia’s marriage don’t quite make sense. She paints a picture of a miserable woman who wants more, and realizes that although Sarah’s quest is pushing her to be more independent herself, she will have to sacrifice whatever remains of her marital bliss if she continues her investigation. However, as the journalist discovers, the answers she finds may save other members of her family from the burden of their horrific secret.

It’s a cathartic and heartbreaking experience, especially since the main question is never answered. Was Julia doing the right thing in seeking out William Rainsferd and telling him about his mother? Will she ever be happy after breaking through the safe shell she inhabited in Paris? De Rosnay presents her readers with these questions among many others that require several seconds away from the book to think.

“Sarah’s Key” is remarkable not because it tells of atrocity, but because it discusses the consequences of atrocity in the lives of people with even the most tenuous connections to the event. It’s all about the prices that people pay for their decisions and about what happens when people choose to forget or hide the truth. Perhaps that is why the ending was so frustrating to me in its obscurity—de Rosnay, unlike most authors who neatly tie up their plots, tells us that real life goes on, and one can never simply blot out the past.

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