Never Forget In Sarah's Key

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Never Forget Sarah Starzynski, one of the protagonists in Tatiana De Rosnay's Sarah's Key, makes a horrific discovery after returning home subsequent to the tragic event of the Vel' d'Hiv in 1942. During this incident, she loses everyone who is important to her, including her brother, her parents, and a friend she makes as she escapes the horrible camp. The other leading character, Julia Jarmond, is a French journalist who lives in the year 2002 with her selfish husband, Bertrand, and charming daughter, Zoe. As Tatiana De Rosnay’s enlightening novel progresses, Sarah Strazynski does not share her dreadful and disturbing Holocaust experience with her own child or husband. She completely defies the Jewish principle: “Take utmost care and guard yourselves carefully so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so…show more content…
I thought there was but I was wrong. A child and a husband are not enough. They know nothing. They don't know who I am. They will never know (261). Clearly, Sarah believes that her new family is a way of escaping her past; yet, it is not. She never lives to tell William the truth because she commits suicide by purposely driving her car into a tree. Obviously, Sarah Strazynski could not bear feeling that her brother’s death is her fault. Truly, her experience of the Vel’ d’Hiv tears her apart, and also causes her to feel no more desire to live. Without a doubt, Sarah never meets terms with the Jewish concept of passing down her stories, thus she never expresses her true feelings or personality to her family. Evidently, Sarah Strazynski, a Holocaust survivor, does not follow and ethical Jewish value of passing down history from generation to generation. On the contrary, she encloses her experience off from the world, and chooses that keeping her secret bottled up is better. Tatiana De Rosnay does a marvelous job in her novel by causing readers to feel the experience as well as relate to the

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