Sarah's Key

I just finished reading Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. Sarah's Key is about a little Jewish girl living in Paris in July 1942. She and her family are "arrested" and taken to the Velodrome d'Hiver, an indoor bicycle track, before being transported to a transit camp for eventual transfer to Auschwitz. But the book is also about an American woman and the Tezac's (the French family that she married into)...Sarah and the Tezac's are forever entwined by the horrific events that warm July night in 1942.

This historical fiction piece is actually two stories that eventually come together midway through the book. The events appalled me and were extremely hard to imagine. But then again, anything surrounding the events of the Holocaust are very hard to digest. I actually read the book in two days (almost 300 pages) because it was so engrossing. I learned a part of French history that I had never been exposed to...French police helping the Nazis to roundup their own people to send them to the concentration camps. The story also details how Sarah lives with the pain and agony of what has happened to her and her family. This aspect of the story was intriguing to me. How does a person who has endured such pain deal with it all? How do you emotionally survive after experiencing such circumstances as a child?

The memorial set up to honor those the endured the roundup at the Velodrome d'hiver.