Using emotion to get at the truth

Tatiana de Rosnay discusses ‘Sarah’s Key’: the novel, the movie and the phenomenon that is taking Europe and the US by storm - both on screen and on bestseller lists.

By HANNAH BROWN
Sarah's Key (photo credit: Courtesy)
Sarah's Key
(photo credit: Courtesy)
‘You read a historical text and it can be very dry,” says Tatiana de Rosnay, the author of the best-selling novel Sarah’s Key.
“But novelists use emotion to get at the truth.”
The book has just been made into a movie starring Kristen Scott Thomas and directed by Gilles Paquet Brenner; it opened throughout Israel this week.
Sarah’s Key tells two stories that intersect.
One is about a journalist, Julia (Scott Thomas), who moves with her French husband and children to Paris in 2002. Working for a news magazine, she gets the go-ahead to write a story about the 60th anniversary of the roundup and deportation of more than 13,000 Parisian Jews in July 1942. They were housed in the Velodrome d’Hiver, a sports stadium in the city, until they were sent to a transit camp and then on to Auschwitz. The other story is set in Paris in 1942, and tells of Sarah (Melusine Mayance), a Jewish child who impulsively locks her little brother in their bedroom closet to protect him when the police come to arrest her family. Eventually the two stories intersect as Sarah’s legacy hits closer to home than Julia would ever have imagined.
The book became a huge international hit, and has been translated into 38 languages. De Rosnay is currently one of Europe’s best-selling authors, and Sarah’s Key was outsold there only by The Da Vinci Code and the Twilight series. The book is currently in fourth place on the New York Times best-seller list.
For de Rosnay, this success was a pleasant surprise. Sarah’s Key was not a story she ever thought was particularly commercial, and in fact she had a great deal of trouble getting it published.
“It took three years,” she says. “My other novels sold only around 2,000 copies each.”
Through a happy coincidence, the book was brought to the attention of publisher Héloïse d’Ormesson. “I certainly never imagined there would be a movie made of it,” the writer says.
But she is very happy that the film has been released and that her characters will reach an even wider audience. She recently spent weeks touring the US to promote the movie.
THE COSMOPOLITAN de Rosnay, formerly the Paris editor of Vanity Fair, comes from a mixed British, Russian and French background and grew up in Paris. She wrote her first novels in French, but chose to write Sarah’s Key in English. Although the book is set in France, “I decided to tell the story through the eyes of an American journalist, and I wasn’t going to make her speak French.”
She needed the outsider’s point of view to tell a story that she knew “almost nothing about” although she grew up in France.
“There is no autobiographical component of this story, it doesn’t haven’t anything to do with my family,” she explains. “I got interested in the round-up at the Velodrome d’Hiver about 10 years ago, when I was working on a novel, La Memoire de Murs [The Memory of Walls]. I am very interested in places and how they harbor memories of what happened in them. And that novel was set on a street not far from the Vel d’Hiv, which is also not far from where I live in Paris.”
She heard about the round-up for the first time when Jacques Chirac, then the president of France, made a speech in 1995, publicly recognizing the role the French police and other civil servants had in rounding up Jews.
“I went to that street,” says de Rosnay. “The Vel d’Hiv had been torn down. There was an annex of the Ministry of Interior in its place, which was a great irony,” given the role that the French government played in arresting Jews and sending them to their deaths. More than a quarter of the 42,000 French Jews sent to Auschwitz were taken during the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup, and only 811 of those survived.
“In the ’70s, nothing was taught in the schools about this,” she says. “I started to read about it [after hearing Chirac’s speech]. I did not know the extent of the French police’s involvement, and I was absolutely horrified. I felt such empathy for the children. The mother in me couldn’t stand the thought of children who were drenched with water and torn from their mothers.”
As the idea for the novel took shape, she spent a year researching the book and interviewed many survivors.
“For over 50 years, nobody had talked about it,” she says. She remembers being especially moved by her encounters with several survivors, some of whom told stories which “were too horrible for them to put into words ever before.”
The idea for Sarah and her family “came from my imagination” and not from any one story in particular. But many Holocaust survivors have embraced the book, “asking me, ‘How did you manage to put yourself in our places?’” De Rosnay now goes to schools to speak about the Velodrome d’Hiver round-up, along with survivors, twice a month.
“I talk to children as young as 10 or 11,” she says. “The younger generation can respond to the emotion I project in my book.”
Although of course such wide success is every author’s dream, it has been unsettling.
“The media interest in me and the book has been a bit overwhelming at times. I’m swamped with e-mails and I can’t answer them all,” she says. “I have two children, Louis and Charlotte, and they joke with me: ‘You have three children: Louis, Charlotte – and Sarah.’” But de Rosnay is trying to make up for some of the hoopla surrounding the movie opening by spending a quiet family vacation this month, “tucked away in the mountains with lots of sunshine and no Internet.” She also hopes that soon she’ll have time to devote to her next novel, although she is philosophical about the unexpected success of this book.
“I know that for the rest of my life, I’ll always be the woman who wrote Sarah’s Key,” she says, sounding quite happy with that fate.