Tatiana's Response

For 60 and some years since the truth about Hitler's 'Final Solution' was revealed, Jews and Gentiles alike have been struggling with the Holocaust. One of the latest attempts is Tatiana De Rosnay's "Sarah's Key".

"Sarah's Key" revolves around the infamous Vel d'Hiv roundup of Jews in the greater Paris area in 16 to 17 of July, 1942, so named after the local nickname for the Velodrome d'Hiver indoor stadium where over 13,000 detainees were held in appalling conditions until transferred to camps outside the city. The children were separated from their parents, who were deported to Auschwitz. The children were to follow in the weeks to come, and gassed upon arrival without even so much as a 'selection'. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect about Vel d'Hiv is that it was a totally French operation, which exceeded the expectations of the Nazi occupiers who initiated it.

De Rosnay weaves two stories together. One is 10 year old Sarah in Paris of 1942 who locks her little brother in a closet, hiding him from the French police detaining her family. The second is Julia, who's life intersects with Sarah's 60 years later. De Rosnay's plot alternates between Sarah's efforts to rescue her brother and Julia's discovery of Sarah and a secret from Paris the summer of '42.
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"Sarah's Key" is fiction but a possible, even plausible story; a gripping account of horror and tragedy .... until runs out of gas midway through the book. It’s a shame De Rosnay didn't quit while she was ahead. My advice is to open to page 175, tear it in two and toss the second half. You will end up with a shorter, but much better book. The pages in your waste bin are De Rosnay's attempt to respond vicariously through her characters. It's a guilt fest; they wallow in remorse for crimes that belong to others and to the past. The moral of the story, so she says, is despair and self flagellation. To a man, all the major players in "Sarah's Key" set a course for one sort of self destruction or another.
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It's true that some survivors couldn't pick up the pieces of shattered lives, but the overwhelming majority chose life. They established second families on the ashes of the ones that had perished.

With nowhere to go, and no one to turn to, the remnant of European Jewry created a home in the wilderness their forefathers dared only to dream of. They remembered, they documented the crimes against humanity, they tried to build a new society in which genocide is unthinkable, but the bottom line is that they moved on.

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The generation of the camps is passing from this world, and now it's vogue to stir the ashes. For some, modern 'new Jews' who have little or no connection to their homeland or faith, the Holocaust is the only 'Jewish' thing left that they can identify with.

But really, how do we respond to the Holocaust?

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Some remember.....

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some are in denial,

 

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And some, like De Rosnay, accuse.

 

The Holocaust exposed a sickness of hatred and evil that has plagued mankind since Cain slew Able. 60 years later the collective 'us' is still licking its wounds. We can we can pick at it like a sore, drown in despair and sink into guilt– or choose life, choose to heal, to learn and even to forgive.

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It's overwhelming, the Holocaust. More than half a century later, we're still groping for the right response, but unfortunately "Sarah's Key" is wrong.