I am reading Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. I am so engrossed in this book I am getting up early just to read. I am fighting to read at work and when I am home, all I want to do is get back into it.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down. (July)
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I knew absolutely nothing about this terrible happening and have as a family historian, I am so engrossed in the lives of these people and their interconnection that I find myslef thinking about them even when I am not reading!

The Vél’ d’hiv’ Round-up involved 13 000 victims from Paris and its suburbs. Over slightly more than two days, the Round-up involved nearly a third of the 42,000 Jews deported to Polish death camps in 1942. The statistics for this terrible year account for over half of the total 76,000 Jewish deportations from France. The roundup accounted for more than a quarter of the Jews sent from France to Auschwitz in 1942, of whom only 811 came home at the end of the war.

I am no stranger to history. I have studied the Holocaust. I thought that man's inhumanity could no longer shock me. Reading this book, fictional or not, I stand corrected. Definately a must read, Definately a book to own.

French Children of the Holocaust

Excuse me now I have to go find out what is happening in my book!