Sarah's Key is the story of the arrest and deportation of a Jewish family living in Paris back in 1942. It is set in the present day with flashback scenes of past events. As a journalist begins writing a story on the anniversary of the Vél’ d’hiv’ Round-up she begins to uncover secrets in her own family that connect her to a Jewish family who were deported. It is a moving story about the broken pieces of the past, family secrets, and how only truth can mend and heal.
The greatest mass-arrest of Jews ever carried out on French soil is known as the Vél’ d’hiv’ Round-up. It 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 death camps in Poland in 1942.The statistics for this terrible year account for over half of the total 76,000 Jewish deportations from France."
On July 16, 2002, upon the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Vél’ d’hiv Round-up, Annette Wieviorka noted in an interview with the daily newspaper Libération: “Apart from an indirect mention in Mauriac’s Cahiers noirs (who was not an eye-witness), there is no known written personal account by a non-Jew. The press of the Résistance, particularly Jewish communists, reported the event. But people didn’t see it. They weren’t aware of what was happening. There’s not a single photo. No amateur films. Nothing. It’s an event that took place without leaving a visible trace today. For a long time, there was one photo of the Vél’ d’hiv’ that was shown everywhere. One day, Serge Klarsfeld took a close look at it and realized that it was actually a picture of collaborators interned after the war. Finally, he found one single photo showing some buses at the Vél’ d’hiv’. That’s it.”
http://www.massviolence.org/the-vel-d-hiv-round-up
