SARAH’S KEY OPENS MORE SECRETS THAT SHE EVER IMAGINED
Some 17,000 French Jews were rounded up during mid-1942 and eventually sent to Auschwitz. Sarah Starcynski’s fictional Parisian family is among those never heard from again. But not Sarah (played by Mélusine Mayance), then 10 years of age. When the gendarme knocks on the front door of her family’s flat, she hides her kid brother in an above-ground closet and keeps the key, believing that she will return in a day or so. But for several days, the family is parked at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a sports stadium, a spectacle far worse than the New Orleans superdome after Hurricane Katrina, where she misses the chance to give her key to a woman who inveigles her way into being released. While in an interment camp awaiting shipment to the death camp, she charms a guard, escapes through barbed wire, and walks to a village, where a sympathetic farmer takes her in. She insists on going back to Paris to use her key to open the closet door, and the farmer indeed accompanies her. During the entire quest, nobody tells Sarah that her brother could not possibly survive without water for that length of time, but her horror is shared by the new family that has just rented the flat the day before, unable to discover the source of the stench. Sarah goes to the flat, barges in, uses her key, and a dead body is at the end of her search. If that were all to Sarah’s Key (Elle s’appelait Sarah),the story would be over at that point. But there are layers of stories, flashbacks, and Hitchcockian pacing to the film, directed by Gilles Pacquet-Brenner and based on the 2007 novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. It seems that journalist Julia Jarmond (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) is on assignment in Paris during 2009, writing about the roundup. She and her husband by some coincidence have bought and remodeled that very flat. Her journalistic imperative to find facts then morphs into a search for what happened to Sarah after the war, a genre reminiscent of the South African documentary The Search for Sandra Laing (1977), but perhaps more akin to the quest of an adoptee seeking to discover birthrelatives. But Sandra Laing was alive. Whatever trace there is of Sarah, alive or dead, requires visiting the farmer, who knows nothing about Sarah after she suddenly left one day for points unknown. And the journalistic challenge leads in many unexpected directions.
Although the comparison with the fate of New Orleanans may seem vaguely relevant, what is perhaps most fascinating is the parallel with a different roundup and internment—that of Japanese on the West Coast of the United States earlier in 1942. Are we to conclude that French authorities learned what was happening to the Japanese in the United States and followed that playbook? Perhaps. But the Japanese survived, went to court, and the Supreme Court ruled that only national security trumps the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against race discrimination, thereby opening the door to the civil rights revolution in peacetime. And Japanese, were released, were allowed to become citizens, set an example as a “model minority,” and have prospered in the United States. Meanwhile, the French, with the third largest Jewish population in the world today, can revisit France’s collaboration with the Nazi gameplan, thanks to Sarah’s Key. MH