Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

I was working on a feature about gardens -- the kind that only time, wealth and attention can create -- when I saw a book lying on a woman’s bed. Sarah’s Key was the title. The cover depicted two children, a mansion and the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Something about the title intrigued me and, after finishing that interview, I went to a nearby bookstore to see what this novel was about. The topic was an all-too-familiar one: the Holocaust. But this book would focus on an all-too-unfamiliar topic: France’s role in the Holocaust.
The novel, by Tatiana de Rosnay, opens on July 16, 1942, in occupied France with a young girl and her parents being hauled away by the French police with Auschwitz intended to be their final destination. The child locks her 4-year-old brother in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard, takes the key with her and tells him she will get him out when she gets back home....
I tend to read slowly. I rarely scan. I read some passages more than once. But this book was so well-written that I found myself reading into the night when I should have been asleep. I loved the simple but hard-hitting style of the narrator telling the child’s story.
The book has a secondary plot and a second narrator -- a contemporary journalist who is researching the French police’s much-forgotten Velodrome d’Hiver roundup, which took place in Paris in 1942.
De Rosnay says the novel’s characters are fictitious, though several events are real -- the Velodrome d’Hiver raids, for instance. If you’ve not heard of this event, read this book, and you shall not soon forget it as much as you may wish you could.
Indeed, after I finished the book, I first thought, now it’s time for something light, something happy. But then I remembered some of de Rosnay’s elderly French characters who would say they did not want to remember, to talk about the events. And I thought, no, we -- I -- must think about these things, these parts of our history.
So, I looked at my living-room bookshelf and I noticed a slender book I’d bought but not yet read. Titled I Never Saw Another Butterfly, it consists of children’s drawings and poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp from 1942-44. It’s time for me to quit procrastinating and read that book.