The book Sarah’s Key, written by Tatiana de Rosnay, begins by introducing the fictional character of Sarah into the real life roundup of Jewish people that occurred at the Vel’ d’Hiv bicycle stadium in France. She then contrasts Sarah’s story of surviving the Holocaust by introducing Julia, an aging journalist. On assignment to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the roundup, Julia discovers that the family she married into owns the house were Sarah used to live. Through her investigative journalism skills, Julia is able to write on a personal level to reveal truths left behind in the past. By feeling connected to Sarah on an emotional level instead of just reading words in a forgotten text book. The French committed a mass atrocity against their own people and sent the members of Sarah’s Jewish community (as well as other French Jews) off to their deaths at Auschwitz. Those survivors …show more content…
As she uncovers these truths it becomes apparent that these stories were hidden and that peaks her curiosity and leads to the guilt felt by not knowing a part of history that was so important. Reading Sarah’s Key under a historical lens proves that history is defined by major events that can get easy headlines and attract the attention of readers, while everyday events are ignored only to be rediscovered by journalists who end up being more credible than historians. In order to get to the bottom of what occurred during history’s most crucial times, journalists are able to recognize the importance of varying stories and find people who have lived through the event to bring the truth to life. Although, when history is on one of these crucial times, the news tends to be overshadowed by huge headliner stories to record intelligence writing on what happened. Not emotional, tear jerking reports from actual people, this usually doesn’t become of relevance until after the fact. While the history and intelligence of what
During World War II, Jews suffered many casualties and struggled for survival. This was caused by concentration camps; the reasoning for Jews to be taken seemed unexplainable in their eyes. To be a Jew in World war II, in my opinion, this was the worst thing that could be done as punishment. Sarah in Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay experienced the sensation of going through these struggles. She suffered and sacrificed her life, knowing that she could’ve died. The traumatic events displayed in Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay portray the real situations and sacrifices people were involved in during World War II.
In Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel, Sarah’s Key, the plot revolves around two protagonists living in France in two very different time periods. Ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski lives in Nazi-occupied Vichy France in 1942 and Julia Jarmond lives in Paris in 2002. Despite them living in distant eras, their paths cross once Julia does research on the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, where the French police rounded up Jews living in France; Sarah and her family are victims of this. As Julia’s research deepens, she discovers that Sarah’s parents were killed at Auschwitz concentration camp, and her brother died hiding, locked in a cupboard waiting for his sister to return for him. Julia’s husband’s family have lived in the apartment Sarah’s brother, Michel, died in; Julia
The idea of the exclusion of important narratives is a common theme amongst many of the historians involved in the discussion. The omission of such narratives would only stand to present an unfinished version of history from which one cannot grasp the lessons history intends to teach. Catherine Emerson would be the first to
In The Journal of Hélène Berr, we are given the first hand account of a young Jewish woman in Paris during the German occupation. This primary source provides a strong insight into how Paris was changing before Hélène’s eyes. Hélène started keeping a journal to preserve memories, but over time, as the German occupation started to change her life, it became something more. Her writing became darker, because so did her outlook. For one, towards the end of the
Now I realise it seems a bit hypocritical of me to attack the media’s representation of a news event when I myself am a part of the hype-generating circus we call mass media. However, the voice of my wise, high-school English teacher echoes in my subconscious that we should always be critical of the texts we consume and conscious of the
Many, many people suffered during the Holocaust war. The Jews in particular were in grave danger. The drama ‘Anne Frank’ outlines so many ways that this historical event caused a shift in the mood of the characters and their relationships. Before the Holocaust, Anne Frank was just an ordinary Jewish girl living in Germany. A German leader named Adolf Hitler developed a plan to destroy the Jews and to rule over the specific places where they lived. What Hitler did to these poor Jews, and the sheer terror they endured at the hands of this Nazi leader is purely unfathomable.
The Holocaust, a morbid atrocity that made people question humanity, was the cause of millions of deaths. One of those victims of this brutality was Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis along with her family. Although she was merely ordinary, Anne Frank kept a diary which became a significant, historical artifact in the modern world as it details her account of concealing her identity from the outside world. Her story, told in an innocent perspective, allows individuals to reflect the dreadful events of the Holocaust and acknowledge how far we have come since then. Even though she died along with millions of other victims from the Holocaust, her spirit still exists thanks to her articulately written words in her diary which is now considered one of the most famous works of literature. Anne Frank’s legacy still lives on today because her story provides a primary source of a dark period in history, insightful contemplation of humanity, and motivation for people to stand up against unjustified persecution.
The Vel’ d’Hiv is a sensitive topic for many individuals. In the book Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, the stories involved in the novel are associated with the Vel’ d’Hiv. The novel tells the story of a Jewish child in 1942 during the time of the Vel’ d’Hiv and of a journalist in present day eager to find out more about the child. The characters in the book Sarah’s Key either want to remember or forget the dark times of the Vel’ d’Hiv.
Life is a precious thing, and it is so precious that some people will undergo severe anguish to hold on to it. During the 1930’s and 1940’s in Germany, people of the Jewish religion were diabolically oppressed and slaughtered, just for their beliefs. Some Jews went to extreme measures to evade capture by the German law enforcement, hoping to hold on to life. Krystyna Chiger was only a small child when her family, along with a group of other desperate Jews, descended into the malignant sewers to avoid the Germans. After living in the abysmal sewers for fourteen months, her group emerged, and when she became an adult, she authored a novel about her time in the sewer. When analyzing the literary elements utilized in her novel, The Girl in the Green Sweater, one can determine how tone and mood, point of view, and conflict convey the message of struggle and survival that was experienced during the Holocaust, and how they help the reader to understand and relate.
Author Wendy Lower begins her novel by explaining how she comes across the files relating to women's involvement during the holocaust. In Ukraine archives she found a list of kindergarten teachers that were involved in reeducation of German children during the Nazi reign. She began looking in other cases for the women’s trials and finds that very few holocaust survivors could name the women they saw and the women often married after the war, taking new names.
The back-and-forth switching of characters and lifetimes between Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, 2002, and Sarah, a ten-year-old Jewish girl arrested by French police in Paris, 1942, alternates in each chapter throughout Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay. The alternation between the settings and story of each character creates suspense and engages the reader by prolonging the climax in an entertaining fashion. After Sarah and her new friend Rachel escape the concentration camp they were imprisoned in, they run and look for a sanctuary. They were hungry and tired and needed a safe place to rest and regain some of their strength. After eluding German soldiers, and being turned away by multiple families on different properties, the two
Finding yourself can be strenuous but is challenge everyone must face in life. The two protagonists Sarah Starzynski and Julia Jarmond go through the ultimate battle to find themselves, making life altering decisions in times of conflict. Sarah’s Key, a novel written by Tatiana de Rosnay’s, features two ongoing plot lines involving two protagonists. Sarah Starzynski, a 10 year-old Jewish girl, born in Paris is arrested with her family during the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup in July 1942. Before leaving Sarah locks her four-year-old brother in their secret cupboard, thinking her family would be returning in just a few hours. The second protagonist is Julia Jarmond, a middle aged American journalist, living in Paris. While working for a French-American
Based on the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Elle s’appelait Sarah, “her name was Sarah,” this is an unsparing account of the Vel’ d’Hiv' Roundup in which tens of thousands of Jews were literally pulled from
The Jews cried silently because they had been broken. They were humiliated, stripped, and objectified. IV. Comparison Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s Auschwitz reminded me of The Diary of Anne Frank. Though both novels take place during WWII, Sara experienced being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for majority of the war.
"On July 16 and 17, 1942, 13, 152 Jews were arrested in Paris and the suburbs, deported and assassinated at Auschwitz. In the Vélodrome d' Hiver that once stood on this spot, 1,129 men, 2,916 women, and 4,115 children were packed here in inhuman conditions by the government of the Vichy police, by order of the Nazi occupant. May those who tried to save them be thanked. Passerby, never forget” (De Rosnay 60). In the book Sarah’s Key, it begins with a young girl named Sarah Starzinsky, who is dealing with her family being removed by the French police and put into a camp. Before the family left, Sarah puts her brother into a closet and locks him in to where he will not come out until she comes back. However, Sarah and her family did not realize that they were not