Friday, November 18, 2011

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay



We had an interesting discussion, starting with comments, such as, “You need to do what you have to do in order to survive.” The characters in the “past” during the round up, as well as the narrator in the present, all demonstrate this motto.
Overall impressions include:
* The book, The Elegance of a Hedgehog also had a concierge (the main character) who knew everything that was going on, just like the concierges in Sarah’s Key knew which Jews had left and therefore which apartments were available.
* It was through the dialogue that the characters came alive. The conversations taking place in the past with Sarah and then the other set of characters with Julia conversing in the present, let us know who they were and what they were thinking.
* Julia is not French, but has lived in France. She never feels like she quite “fits in.” The Jews probably thought they “fit in” until they were “rounded up” and ripped from their homes, work, and community.

Why do you think the author chose to have two stories going on?
* All of the characters in the past knew about the brother being locked in the secret room, but no one talked about it. Like the actual war – Jews were being taken, but no one was talking (doing?) anything about it, probably due to fear.
* Is that why the police did it? Were they afraid of Hitler’s army or happy to follow?
* Julia is moving into an apartment that used to belong to her mother-in-law. Her father-in-law is the young boy in the past living in Sarah’s old apartment who witnesses her return and the gruesome discovery of Sarah’s brother, which Sarah never gets over.
* As a society, everyone is responsible. Julia takes on the responsibility of opening a closed door into the past and bringing a story to light for her current family.

Clips from the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1668200/
Based on Tatiana de Rosnay's best-selling novel, Sarah's Key tells the story of an American journalist on the brink of making big life decisions regarding her marriage and her unborn child. What starts off as a research article about the Vel'd'Hiv Roundup in 1942 in France more »ends up as a journey towards self-discovery as she stumbles upon a terrible secret and discovers the heartbreaking story of a Jewish family forced out of their home, a home that is now their own.

Form imdb:
10-year-old Sarah Starzynski denies to the authorities carrying out the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup that her little brother Michel is at home, and locks him in a hidden closet. She tells him to stay there and wait until she returns. She takes the key with her when she and her parents are transported to the VĂ©lodrome d'Hiver by the Paris Police and French Secret Service. Some French neighbors cheer the roundup while others jeer and say "They will come for you next."

The deportees are transferred to the Beaune-la-Rolande, the transit deportation detention camp, in squalid conditions and burning heat, in cramped quarters without adequate water or toilet facilities. First the men then the women are deported to the extermination camp in Auschwitz, and the children have to stay after being forcefully and cruelly separated from their mothers by the Paris police. Sarah tries to escape with a friend, Rachel, after noticing a small hole in the ground underneath a fence. A sympathetic Paris police guard, Jacques, whom Sarah wins over by calling by name, and convincingly begs to let them go so she can save her brother, hesitates but finally agrees, and lifts the barbed wire over the hole to let them out as he smiles sympathetically.

After searching for a safe place, exhausted, Sarah and Rachel, fall asleep in a dog house at a village home where they had originally been rebuffed. In the morning, they are discovered by its owner. Realizing who they are, he and his wife decide to help them. Rachel is dying, and when they call attention to the sick girl by calling in a doctor, a skeptical but implicitly sympathetic German officer asks them if they know anything about a second child and warn them of the dire consequences of hiding Jews. Rachel's body is taken away, while Jules and Genevieve, the elderly couple, hide Sarah. Days later they take her back to her family's apartment building in Paris. Sneaking past the concierge, Sarah runs up to her apartment, knocking on the door furiously. A boy, twelve years old, answers. She rushes in to her old room, past the boy, and unlocks the cupboard. Horrified by what she finds, she starts screaming hysterically. The boy's father rushes in, and sees the decomposing body of Sarah's little brother. (The body is never shown onscreen.)

After the war, Sarah continues to live with the old couple on the farm, together with their two grandsons, who treat her like their own granddaughter/sister, until she is 18. In letters, the couple describes Sarah's sadness and melancholy. When she turns 18, though, she moves to the United States, hoping to put everything that happened behind her, using the name Dufaure, the surname of the elderly couple. She gets married and has a son, William, although she stops corresponding with Jules and Genevieve soon after being married. When her son is 9, no longer able to handle what happened to Michel—for whose death she blames herself—Sarah commits suicide by driving into the path of a truck, although her son had always been under the impression that her death was an accident.

In the present, the French husband of journalist Julia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) inherits the apartment of his grandparents (his elderly father was the boy who opened the door to Sarah in 1942). Having previously done an article on the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup, Julia finds her interest piqued when she learns that the apartment came into her husband's family at about the time of the Roundup, and she begins to investigate what happened 65 years earlier. Her father-in-law, knowing the back story and wanting to protect his elderly mother (who had been the wife of the couple who took possession of the seized apartment) from knowing the truth, resents Julia's unwelcome prying, but realizes he'll have to bring her in on the story to keep control of it, and tells her what he knows. Having got much of the story, she goes on an obsessive quest to find any any trace of Sarah, eventually learning (in Brooklyn) of her death and finally locating William (in Italy). She meets with him and asks him for information about his mother, but learns to her surprise that William does not know his mother's history or even that she was a Jew, believing only that she had been a French farm girl. Listening in amazement to what Julia has uncovered, he refuses to believe it, flatly rejecting the story and brusquely dismissing Julia. Later, everything is confirmed by his dying father, who finally tells him the whole secret story of Sarah's background, including what led to his mother's suicide.

Julia has unexpectedly and joyously discovered that she's pregnant, having given up hope of a second child after years of fertility treatments and unsuccessful attempts to conceive, but her husband flatly disagrees that they should have another child at this point in life. He makes it clear that he wants her to have an abortion, saying he is too old even though he cherishes their teenaged daughter, Zoe. She hesitates about getting an abortion, and ultimately keeps the child. Later, having divorced her self-absorbed husband and moved to New York City, she gives birth to a daughter.

The film begins in 1942, then abruptly switches to 2009, and after that, alternates between the past and the present. It ends with a scene in the present day in which William, having accepted the truth and contacted Julia, meets her for lunch and gives her additional information about his mother. At one point in the end scene, Julia has brought her toddler daughter along to the meeting. William asks the little girl what her name is, and she answers "Lucy". Later on, William tells Julia how sweet little "Lucy" is, and Julia laughs and tells him that "No, no, Lucy is her toy giraffe." (implying that the child misinterpreted William's earlier question, and thought he wanted to know the name of the toy giraffe, instead of hers) "So what did you name your daughter?" Julia looks at him tenderly: "Her name is Sarah." At the news, William breaks down in tears as Julia comforts him.