Sarah’s Key

Title: Sarah’s Key

Author: Tatiana De Rosney

Publisher: John Murray Publishers

Place: Great Britain

Date: 2008

Sarah’s key takes place in Paris in 2002. Julia Jarmond is a journalist and writes for an American magazine. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and her husband Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by her husband’s family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She decides to find out what happened to the former residents: Wladyslaw and Raywka Starzynsk. The parents of the 10 year old Sarah and four-year-old Michael.

In the summer of 1942 Sarah attempted to save her brother by locking him in the closet. She managed to escape deportation to Auschwitz but it was too late when she came back for her brother. She survived world war two tanks to an old Genevieve couple where she stayed til she was eighteen and then moved to America. She married and had a son, William. When William was nine she wasn’t able to handle what happened to Michael and committed Suicide.

The more Julia found out about Sara, the more she discovered about her husband Bertand’s family and their secrets. She leaves him in the end to go back to America, where she has her second daughter who she names Sarah.

For further information see:
http://www.un.org//holocaustremembrance/ index.shtml
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/holocaust-fiction
http://library.jccc.edu/guides/literature/holocaust.html