So, I joined a book club and our book for September was Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosay. I literally could not put it down. It was a difficult book to read in that the subject matter included children and the holocast.
Without giving away too much information, it is about a girl named Sarah who's family was arrested (because they were Jewish) in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, July 16, 1942 in Paris, France. It is also about an American woman who has been living in France for 20 years and as she learns about the Vel' d'Hiv for an article she is writing.
The "Roundup" is something I have never heard of until I read this book. Since, I have googled for more historical information. Here is some historical information:
The roundup, which was part of a continent-wide plan to intern and exterminate Europe's Jewish population, was a joint operation between the Germans and French administrators (see below for clarification).
Until the German occupation of France in 1940, no roundup would have been possible because no census listing religions had been held in France since 1874. A German ordinance on 21 September 1940, however, forced Jewish people of the occupied zone to register at a police station or sub-prefectures (sous-préfectures).
Theodor Dannecker, the SS captain who commanded the German police in France, said: "This filing system subdivided it into files alphabetically classed, Jews with French nationality and foreign Jews having files of different colours, and the files were also classed, according to profession, nationality and street." These files were then handed to section IV J of the Gestapo, in charge of the "Jewish problem."
The Vel' d'Hiv roundup was not the first such roundup in World War II. Nearly 4,000 Jewish men were arrested on 10 May 1941 and taken to the Gare d'Austerlitz and then to camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-La-Rolande. Women and families followed in July 1942.
The roundup was aimed at Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and those whose origins couldn't be determined, all aged from 16 to 50. There were to be exceptions for women "in advanced state of pregnancy" or who were breast-feeding, but "to save time, the sorting will be made not at home but at the first assembly centre".
The Germans planned for the French police to arrest 22,000 Jews in Greater Paris. The Jews would then be taken to internment camps at Drancy, Compiègne, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. André Tulard "will obtain from the head of the municipal police the files of Jews to be arrested... Children of less than 15 or 16 years will be sent to the Union Générale des Israélites de France, which will place them in foundations. The sorting of children will be done in the first assembly centres."
Beginning at 4:00 a.m. on 16 July 1942, 13,152 Jews were arrested according to records of the Préfecture de police, of which 5,802 (44%) were women and 4,051 (31%) were children. An unknown number of people, warned by the French Resistance or hidden by neighbors or benefiting from a lack of zeal, deliberate or accidental, of some policemen, escaped being rounded up. Conditions for the arrested were harsh: they could take only a blanket, a sweater, a pair of shoes and two shirts with them. Most families were split up and never reunited.
After arrest, some Jews were taken by bus to an internment camp in an incomplete complex of apartments and apartment towers in the northern suburb of Drancy. Others were taken to the Vélodrome d'hiver in the 15th arrondissement, which had already been used as a prison in a roundup in the summer of 1941.
The Germans demanded the keys of the Vel' d'Hiv from its owner, Jacques Goddet, who had taken over from his father Victor and from Henri Desgrange. The circumstances in which Goddet surrendered the keys remain a mystery and the episode is given only a few lines in his autobiography.
They had no lavatories: of the 10 available, five were sealed because their windows offered a way out and the others were blocked. The arrested Jews were kept there with only water and food brought by Quakers, the Red Cross and a few doctors and nurses allowed to enter. There was only one water tap. Those who tried to escape were shot on the spot. Some took their own lives.
After five days, the prisoners were taken to the internment camps of Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers, and later to extermination camps.
The internment camp at Drancy – which is now the subsidised housing that it was intended to be – was easily defended because it was built of tower blocks in the shape of a horseshoe. It was guarded by French gendarmes. It was ordered the internees to starve, who banned them from moving about within the camp, to smoke, to play cards etc."
The roundup accounted for more than a quarter of the 42,000 Jews sent from France to Auschwitz in 1942, of whom only 811 returned to France at the end of the war.
The primary significance of the roundup was the killing of innocent people because of their religion. But there is a political and social significance because the Vel' d'Hiv has remained a symbol of national guilt and of national outrage.
The wartime history of France differed from that of other occupied nations in that the country was socially and politically divided, until it was all finally occupied by the Germans after being divided into an occupied and non-occupied zone.
There were heroes of the Occupation and there were those who faced death through dishonour. In between were the millions who got on with their lives without the benefit of knowing how the war would turn out. It is they, examining their consciences and wondering whether they could have done more.
Referenece: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vel'_d'Hiv_Roundup
Tatina de Rosnay wrote Sarah's key in such a way that you experience the emotions and feelings that these innocent people felt as they were arrested by the French police and the days that followed.
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