In the first half of this book, two stories interlace with each other in short alternating chapters. Sarah Starzynski, a ten-year-old Parisian girl born to Jewish parents, is captured in the round-up of June 16, 1942, and imprisoned with almost 10,000 others in an indoor cycling arena, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, awaiting transportation to Auschwitz. When the police arrive, she has just time to hide her younger brother in a concealed closet in their apartment, locking him in and promising to return. Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist married to a Frenchman, researching for a story on the "Vél d'Hiv," stumbles on the trail of Sarah's family, and becomes obsessed with trying to discover her fate. She is struck by the fact that the round-up and subsequent disposal was carried out, not by the Gestapo, but by ordinary French policemen, enabled by a citizenry that for the most part looked the other way. A coincidental discovery leads her to question the involvement of her husband's family at the time and to re-examine her own marriage.
Apart from this one coincidence that one has to grant for the sake of the novel, Tatiana de Rosnay mostly avoids melodrama, excessive sentiment, or plot surprises. Sarah's story may be merely a variant on the Holocaust narrative often told before, but its child's-eye viewpoint gives it a moving authenticity, and the short chapters keep it bearable. Especially touching are the glimpses of individual concern and kindness among the general indifference of the French people; the novel honors those unsung saints and heroes who put aside their fear to help in individual ways.
At the half-way point, however, de Rosnay is forced to give up Sarah's direct narrative, telling her story solely through what Julia Jarmond is able to discover about her. Julia is an attractive character, a woman in her forties trying to balance the demands of profession, motherhood, and marriage, while retaining her independence as a foreign female in a chauvinistic society; her story could make an interesting novel all on its own. But it cannot possibly compete with the searing truth of the Holocaust, and for the first half of the book it makes no attempt to do so. When the side-by-side narrative ends, we are indeed invested in Julia's personal concerns, but may feel uneasy about it, as though her questions of personal identity and romance are trivial compared to the horror of where the book started. To de Rosnay's credit, she does not try to tie everything up in an implausibly neat ending, but she cannot stop the book from thinning out at the end, although the final pages are touching and suitably unresolved.
Any novel dealing with the Holocaust is full of echoes of other books. De Rosnay's portrayal of Parisians under occupation chimes perfectly with the picture in
SUITE FRANCAISE by Irène Nemirovsky, who herself suffered the same fate as Sarah's family. The transit camps and deportation of French Jews feature in Sebastian Faulks'
CHARLOTTE GRAY. And the story of an American in France looking into an earlier time somewhat resembles
THE VIRGIN BLUE by Tracy Chevalier, an author whom De Rosnay apparently admires. Readers who enjoyed any one of these would probably appreciate SARAH'S KEY, a book that stands up well to all but the first of them.
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