I'm currently reading the book, Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay. It's a fictional story weaved around the real events of July 1942 in Paris, France. The Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of Jewish families by the French police before being shuttled off to their murders at Auschwitz. I'm completely captivated by this book and I'm not even half-way through it yet. Here's what the back cover says: Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard - their secret hiding place - and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released. Sixty Years Later: Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future. Barring that last bit of nonsense about Julia's romantic future, this is why I purchased this book at a yard sale last year. That and my name is Sarah and I like keys and that bit felt strange. I like the writing style overall. How each chapter is 1942 and then the present and then back again, following a rhythm. Honestly it's making me want to continue reading and not put the book down because, "What happens!! I need to know!" I also like how in 1942 no one in Sarah's family has names. It is The Mother or The Woman, the Daughter or The Girl or The Brother, etc. It is about Sarah, as she is The Girl, but the only people who receive names are the people that The Girl knows that aren't related to her. It's an interesting perspective; it's weird, it's slightly unsettling, and I think it goes with the tone of the incident, as they'd just be nameless sub humans to the authorities that were rounding them up in the first place. (Eventually they do gain names, once Julia in the present day finds out that knowledge, which I thought was a cool bit of writing tactic). I'm not overly fond of the story that centers around Julia or how that is written. I can't get into her shoes really and she seems like the type of woman I'd never want to be friends with and makes me feel that if this is what normal people are like, then you can keep normal. Her daughter seems bitchy, she seems to only be with her husband because he's good in bed, she's overly worried that she's not French enough after having lived there for almost thirty years. Just the way her "normal" life is written isn't appealing in the least. I'm totally onboard with her having gay friends and they were her first friends when she moved to Paris and I like that she's not flippant about her writing assignment covering the 60th anniversary of Vel' d'Hiv', unlike most of the other people she's surrounded by. She actually cares. And her grandmother in law, Mamé, actually seems pretty awesome and feisty and they get along well. This is a reading group edition, so it is pretty interesting to note that at the end of the book, Rosnay is answering a question and states, "I take it to be a magnificent compliment that I have created a character who could really exist and that women can identify with!" Yuck. I have a theory, a few chapters back from where I left off reading last night. I think that Julia is Sarah reincarnated. She read up on Vel' d'Hiv' since that was her writing assignment and it left her feeling more shaken than just merely reading about things that happened to people sixty years prior, like she remembered it, though that is not said. "...the events of July 1942 had awakened a vulnerability within me, triggered something deep, unspoken, that haunted me, that burdened me." There's also the bit about Sarah's brother locked in the cupboard. I think Sarah was kind of stupid. It seems like all the other kids her age knew what was up, but she was all, "We're coming back and this is some slight nuisance." They're not coming back and her brother will starve in that secret cupboard. Her father cries knowing she has the key and where her brother is. It'd be different it had been written where kids her age and younger weren't aware, but it wasn't written that way and therefor makes Sarah out to be the lone dumb pre-teen in the group. The chapter I stopped on has her and a girl, Rachel, escaping from the internment camp between the Winter Velodrome where they'd been locked up in Paris and Auschwitz where their parents had been taken. I don't think she'll make it back (to the apartment in Paris). Besides, the conceirge of her apartment complex turned them in and has the keys to the apartment now. We found that out back in chapter 1 or 3 or 5. There's no way she can get back in there, right? Besides the fact that in the present day, Julia's husband has just inherited Mamé's apartment. At some point they had purchased the flat next door and Julia's husband wants to knock out this wall. "Oh my god! Sarah's dead brother is in there! I just know it!" Well, turns out that Mamé and her husband got the apartment at the end of July in 1942 because it was suddenly vacated. "I knew it!" Though I honestly have no idea if Julia is Sarah or that the wall separating the apartments will hold the remains of Sarah's brother, these are my guesses as to how this story is going. Will see if I'm correct. ************************************************************************************************** So, I actually finished the remaining 3/4th of the book two days ago. I was only a tiny bit correct and mostly wrong. That is the apartment in question, but Julia won't find The Boy's body in the walls. Also, she isn't Sarah at all and the connection that Rosnay was making falls flat to me. Julia was super obsessed with finding out the family and specifically The Girl, Sarah. But it turns out that really she just needed to marry Sarah's son? That is the basic gist of the "present" story. BORING! She isn't Sarah, she isn't somehow related to Sarah, she isn't related to anyone Sarah knew, she isn't secretly Jewish feeling this pull to this camp because relatives unkown to her had been there and suffered. No, she just needs to have her husbands baby at all costs, just for them to split up and her to date people in New York City, she doesn't care about because she can't be alone, and then end up with Sarah's son. That doesn't seem nearly as interesting as any real connection. Because it's never explained why she's so comfortable with Sarah's son, William. Why they just click. I'm assuming now that I've finished the book that, what? they're soul mates and that was the whole reason for the pull towards France at a young age and marrying into the family that took Sarah's life over, and finding out all of that information, just because she was destined to marry William? Give me a fucking break. Really the only good parts about this book were this history parts (though Sarah Starzynski and her family aren't real, but the events were), so I now know all about the Vel' d'Hiv' atrocity. That and Julia's grandmother by marriage, Mamé, and also Julia's father in law, Edouard, because they bonded over this story and finding Sarah. Also the French grandchildren of the old couple that had taken Sarah in, Gaspard and Nicolas, who thought of Sarah like a sister and missed her; or even Nicolas' granddaugher Nathalie who was helping in the search. All of those characters made for good reading. Or what about the guy, Guillaume, whose grandmother had been at Vel d'Hiv' and survived? He seemed like he was going to have a more meaningful plot than merely that of Julia saying he was one of her Super BFF's or that he lent her some out of print books. Seriously? Her photographer had more of a role than this guy. Why include him? To what purpose? It seemed like he was just a bit of filling, to add more Jewishness to the book? He could have been a better character, I think. There were also some glaring continuity issues. She decides not to abort the baby after seeing that the 60th anniversary memorial for Vel d'Hiv' was starting on the telly. She left and states that she's going home. The next chapter has her at the memorial (wait...? why include that she's going home if she isn't, or if she did, why was that even important? It felt like a chapter was missing.) and then Guillaume has been in attendance with her the entire time, but he's only randomly mentioned by the time she's about to leave the memorial. Confusing. There's another part, towards the end as well, but I forget what it was or what was so mixed up about it. And the ending was confusing, talking about all the men Julia had dated since coming to New York just so she wouldn't be lonely, and she's with her current boyfriend at the park, and then we move on, but there's a random return back to that park. Was she thinking or daydreaming that in between bit? Because it was jarring to go back and wasn't seamless in the least. Then there's Sarah. Her story was so sad and tragic, but then why wouldn't it be? Basically when she escaped the camp with Rachel, they were found by an older couple who took them in, but Rachel had dysentery. They sent for the doctor, but he was mysteriously missing. The man went for another doctor but it was a mistake and he brought the Nazi's with him. They almost found Sarah's hiding place amongst the potatoes in the root cellar, and the elderly couple tried to get them drunk so they'd forget about Rachel, but it didn't work and they took her anyway. When Sarah was better from her time in the camp, the old couple took her to Paris, because she was dead-set on finding out what happened to her brother. They made it there and she ran past the concierge of her building, up to the 4th floor and banged on her door. A boy her own age appeared at the door, which was Edouard, which would be Julia's father in law in 60 years. She ran past him and to her room, which was now his. He was yelling at her to get out of their home and got his dad. The old people had made it to the apartment, so all four of them were in the room when she finally put the key in the hidden lock and opened to the door to a rotten smell. And that's when Sarah broke. She went back to live with the old couple in the village and came to know their son and grandchildren as family, they even gave her their surname. She was never happy except the day when she saw the ocean. When she was twenty, she left France for New York. Sent a card back to the old people that she was getting married, and that was the last time they ever heard from her. She kept the key and a notebook where she basically wrote out her grief. Always stating her little brothers name, Michel. Moving away from the place of horrors did not good. Hiding her past and her religion did not good. A husband, who was nice, and a baby boy did not good. Before her son found the notebook everyone thought she'd had just died in a mere car accident, but she killed herself; deliberately ramming her car into that tree. The son hadn't known anything about his mother until Julia tracked him down. He didn't know she was from Europe, that she was Jewish, that her family had been murdered, that she inadvertently killed her little brother. It was nice that he got to meet Edouard, for whom Sarah had always haunted him. He told William that his father sent money every month for ten years after Sarah had been there, so she'd have something to make a life with. That Edouard had never forgotten her. All of that was bitter-sweet for the present day and the people involved, but sad for Sarah. It was worth a once-through but that bull malarky about romance was weird and oddly placed and did this woman just want to write a romance novel with a tragic back story? But now to the events of the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup, which is short for Vélodrome d'Hiver or Winter Velodrome (basically a sports arena) which is where everyone was held before their removal from Paris. It is also known by its code name of Opération Vent printanier (Operation Spring Breeze). There had already been culls for Jewish men previously in France, and they were in hiding thinking no one would take the women and children. On the days of the 16th and 17th of July (it had been set for the 14th, but they rescheduled so as not to inconvenience Bastille Day) 1942 every Jewish person was rounded up in Paris. Indeed all Jewish people were rounded up in France during this time, but that is not the story of Vel' d'Hiv' as it only centers on the Parisian Jews. The French police had been tallying up names for months and months with the help of conceige's and other "concerned" citizens. They were all shuttled off in city busses to the Vélodrome d'Hiver and locked inside. For five days, thousands upon thousands of Jewish people were crammed in like sardines. They air was stifling from the heat, the toilets too few for such a great number and quickly were out of order. People had to go where they stood. The stench as unbearable. People died, either from lack of food and or water, extreme stress, or by killing themselves. A few people escaped. Then they were put back onto the city busses and shipped to the train yard to be crammed into package cars and shipped to one of the French internment camps; Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande. The Parisian Jews were shipped to the last one, Beaune-la-Rolande. There they were stripped of their valuables and shoved into barracks with lice infested straw for bedding. The men were separated from the women. The men were shipped off to Auschwitz first, then the women were torn from their children; on that day you could hear the anguished howling throughout the village. The women were beaten, kicked, and doused with cold water to get them to stop clawing for their children. The age separation was 15. The 15 year old boys had already been barracked with the men and shipped off. The girls who were this age or older were marched out of the gates of Beaune-la-Rolande for the train station; off to Auschwitz, to be gassed upon their arrival. The children were left unattended and there were only a few guards there. The children were ill with dysentery (and if you're wondering, you have horrible diarrhea, and if you're a small child, well you'll just be covered in it because no one's there to take care of you), and they were covered with lice (so badly, they even had lice in their eyelashes), they were feeling the effects of starvation as well. Plus the fact that they were alone. Completely alone without any family. So as not to create an outcry, the French then shipped these children to the Parisian camp of Drancy, so that it would appear that families hadn't been separated, and then shipping those children, along with these random adults, off to Auschwitz and to their deaths. Drancy had mainly been used during those previous culls of male Jews, and now for any stragglers the French had rounded up, as well as these now orphaned children. Out of the 42,000 Jews that were rounded up in France and sent to Auschwitz in 1942 alone, only 811 were alive by the end of the war. And those are just the one's who never managed to escape before arriving at Auschwitz, which was not a large number. Those 811 people are the one's who managed to hang on, to not be gassed, to not be worked or starved to death, the one's who didn't manage an escape at that camp. And though those 811 people can be counted as survivors, are they really? They would have been haunted for the rest of their lives by everything they had witnessed and endured. Former ghosts of themselves. How far does "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" go until there's a breaking point? Because I would think living in a Nazi concentration camp would be the breaking point, y'all. 811 people may seem like a large number by itself, but over half of the Jewish-French population was dead by 1945. Which makes you realize just how small that 811 really is when referring to survivors. That number doesn't even include the French-Jewish men who were gathered up and shipped off in 1940 and 1941! It would be different if we were talking about the number of French-Jewish soldiers who never came back from battle. But these were people just living their lives, made into scapegoats yet again (it happened during the Black Death years in the fifteenth century. The French killed and removed their Jewish population then too, convinced it was them spreading the Black Death/aka The Bubonic Plague - but they weren't the only one's, most of Europe was acting in the same fashion during that time.), rounded up, tortured, and murdered for... wait for it... absolutely nothing at all. Sure you can say terms like "Ethnic cleansing", "The Greater Good", "But there was a war going on...", or "But they thought they were the enemy." Sure those are reasons, I suppose, but they are more pathetic reasons or paltry excuses for destroying the lives of millions upon millions of people, Jewish and non-Jewish, for the sake of absolutely nothing. There was no reason those people had to be treated as less than human and murdered except because one dude was crazy and spread his crazy fear mongering to other people who spread it to other people and most people were then convinced of this horrible and terrible enemy, when they were ignoring the real enemy, the man giving the orders to men giving more orders to wipe these people off the face of the Earth because he had issues. to be continued in next post...
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November 2019
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