Sarah's Key
What is truth? Something one can handle, or not. Something one needs to uncover, or hide. The truth of the life of each of us is in our individual histories; the lives of our parents, grandparents, and the experiences of the eras in which they lived.
On July 16 and 17, 1942 the French police rounded up 13,000 Jews in Paris and corralled them in the Vel’ d’Hiv (Winter Velodrome), an arena used for indoor bicycle racing and other sports. For several days in the heat of summer, this enclosed space, with its windows sealed shut for security and no running water, no permitted toileting facilities and no beds, imprisoned more than 7000 people until they were trucked to holding camps. There, in the first stage, men were separated from women; husbands from their wives and children. Following that, the women were separated from their children. Following that, Auschwitz.
Sarah’s Key is a tale of survival during one of the most shameful, darkest episodes of modern western history. Truths we wish we could forget. Truths we must always remember.
The story begins on a hot summer day in Paris, 1942. That fateful day when the French committed the irreparable, and as Jacques Chirac said in his apology of 1995, “delivered those it protected to their executioners”.
Two young children, a sister and brother, are playing under the covers of their shared bed. The police bang on the door. Father is not home. Mother begs to be left alone. The young girl comes out of the bedroom, makes instant sense of the situation and returns discreetly to hide her younger brother in the closet and make him promise to stay there until she returns. He promises and she locks him in, taking the key with her.
Daughter and mother are taken from their flat, reunited with father, who must have been just down the street, and all are carted off to the Vel’ d’Hiv. Little brother remains their most important concern and while tensions mount as they struggle with their reality and the need to protect him within the family circle, they admit to the police his whereabouts and beg that he be arrested and brought to them. We see the face of a policeman as he absorbs the details of the hiding place, his concern, perhaps foreboding; we see the torment of the family.
Running parallel to this history is a contemporary story. A middle-aged couple have inherited their grandmother’s Paris apartment, which she had lived in since August 1942. As an architect he will remodel and update the apartment. She is a journalist working for a magazine en par with Time Magazine. Her assignment - the Vel’ D’Hiv round-up.
Having that tenacious quality which makes good journalists write what we want to read, she is driven to solve a mystery. It doesn’t take her long to uncover threads of truth between their apartment, the young Jewish family of wartime Paris, and the Vel’ d’Hiv. In her obsession she upsets the people whose lives are interwoven with those threads and uncovers their humanity.
The movie is based upon the historical fiction novel Sarah’s Key, written by Tatiana de Rosnay (2007). As with many contemporary novels, there is a subplot running alongside the main story. Personally, I think the movie doesn’t benefit from it and it provides for an ending I found too feeble and predictable for such a strong narrative, but fortunately the impact of the movie is not diminished by it.
The movie on the whole is a poignant experience. The truth about a painful history encapsulated within a fibrous fiction of truths and denials, with not too much sentimentality. It is, in fact, unapologetically tragic. And yet, as with most lives lived long enough, it is also edifying.
Em Hofstede
