Sarah’s Key

“I’ll come back for you later. I promise.” 

This is the promise that Sarah makes to Michel, before she is taken with her mother and father from their apartment. While being moved about and kept as a prisoner, Sarah remains focused on this promise. She does finally manage to return to her brother, but she is too late. 

“She pronounced their names with an expression of distaste […] as if she was saying a swearword, one of those dirty words you were never supposed to utter.” 

The concierge represents a portion of the Parisian population that had deep anti-Semitic feelings. France experienced some of the same hatreds that the Germans experienced during the war.  

“The night began to fall, slowly, and with it the girl felt that her despair, and that of the thousands of people locked in here with her, began to grow, like something monstrous, out of control, a sheer, utter despair that filled her with panic.” 

Sarah begins to sense that the situation she’s found herself in is direr than she first realized. The darkness becomes a metaphor for the hopelessness that the prisoners experience while in the camps. 

“Why was being Jewish so dreadful? Why were Jews being treated like this?” 

Sarah, at her young age, does not understand anti-Semitism or even why one group of people would hate another group. This quote expresses her innocence in a dark time, an innocence that she will lose shortly. 

“She was no longer a happy little ten-year-old girl. She was someone much older. Nothing would ever be the same again.” 

Sarah loses her innocence and exuberance while in the camps. She witnesses beating, starvation, and death. Any sweet visions of life and possibility fade for her. For her, this hardening becomes a means of survival. 

“Shame on us all for not having stopped it.” 

An elderly woman who witnessed the roundup of the Jews expresses the shame that many Parisians feel over being involved in something so horrible. Everyone who said nothing is implicated in this statement.

“Him, a Jew! Such a proper gentleman, too. What a surprise.” 

Sarah did not understand this statement when she first heard it spoken and does not understand why it should matter that someone is a Jew. Again, this statement reflects French anti-Semitism. 

“’There,’ she said, exulting. ‘I’m burying the stars. They’re dead. In their grave. Forever and ever.” 

Sarah buries her and Rachel’s stars, symbolizing two things. First, it symbolizes that Sarah refuses to be a victim of history, and that she will fight to get back to Michel. Second, it reflects the death of her parents and the many others who died and were buried during the Holocaust. 

“[…] it’s not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance

Frank Levy says this to Julia as a warning about digging too deep into the past. His warning would prove correct, as her investigation sets off a series of events that ends some important relationships for her. 

“You’re playing with Pandora’s box. Sometimes, it’s better not to open it.” 

Frank Levy refers here to the Greek myth of Pandora from Hesiod’s Work and Days. In the myth, Pandora opens a box from Zeus, and unwittingly lets loose death and disease across the land. 

“There had been no sign of her name in the graveyard…had she escaped?” 

This is the first moment that gives Julia hope that maybe Sarah did not die alongside her parents. This sets off a series of events that causes Julia to follow the past in the manner she does. 

“It has been there, within us. And it has been there for me, for the past sixty years.” 

Edouard says this when revealing his family’s secret to Julia. He makes it seem like his family has been carrying a stain with them, and that he, particularly, has had to carry around this baggage for a long time. 

“Odd, the way dates go. Ironic, almost. Tuesday, July 16, 2002. The Vel’ d’Hiv’ commemoration. And precisely the date of the abortion.” 

This quote symbolizes the connection for Julia between the events of Sarah’s past and Julia’s own present. The irony, too, is that those connections take a physical manifestation at times. 

“There was something sad about Sarah, she was not a joyful, outgoing person.” 

This description of Sarah as a teenager and young woman shows how much the events of her youth changed and shaped her. The bright young girl the reader knew in the early chapters does not match up to the hardened young woman Sarah becomes. 

“Sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty-five years old and not knowing.” 

Julia expresses her disgust at being an adult living in a city without truly understanding its real history or the history of its people. Julia, though, in this regard, is no different than many, if not most, native Parisians. 

“I had cut him out of my life, and the irony was that I was carrying his child.” 

Julia expresses an idea that runs throughout the novel—that of what’s carried through one’s life, and what its history is. The novel suggests that it’s impossible to quiet our pasts, that our pasts stay with us for better or worse. 

“What had I hoped for anyway? For her to welcome me with open arms, pour me a cup of tea, and murmur: ‘Of course I forgive the Tézac family.’ Crazy.”

Julia feels a bit naïve regarding her mission to find Sarah. She feels silly at times about how she expects it to all come together like a puzzle. The irony is that it does come together, but not in the way that she had expected. 

“Sarah was dead…It was too late. Thirty years too late.”

Julia, upon hearing about Sarah’s car crash, fears that she’ll never be able to communicate to her the story of the apartment and what’s she’s learned. She can’t, of course, but she does connect with her son, William.

“I felt as if I had emerged from a long-lasting, mellow, protective Fog […] Now […] there were only facts.” 

Once Julia makes the break with Bertrand, she feels free to explore the things that matter the most to her. She no longer feels his presence looming over her.

“I began to feel like a little old lady, shipped here and there, like Mamé was shipped here and there, within the familiar boundaries of her ‘home,’ receiving the same placid smile, the same stale benevolence. It was easy, letting someone else control your life.” 

Julia is bedridden after the incident at the café in Italy. She feels herself fall into the comfort of just letting go of the Sarah story. It takes William’s arrival to wake her up to the story again. 

“Zakhor. Al Tichkah./ Remember. Never forget.” 

This is a popular Hebrew expression used around the Holocaust. In Sarah’s poem for Michel, it symbolizes not only the remembrance of the death of the Jews in Paris, but the death and memory of her brother, Michel. 

“No idea of what a family secret is. No manners. No sensitivity. Uncouth, uneducated American: L’Americaine avec ses gros sabots.” 

Bertrand expresses these attitudes toward Julia throughout the novel. Ironically, they tend to mirror the hatred of anti-Semitism, only in this context are directed at Americans. 

“Like Zoë, I felt I was a Frenchy, too, despite being an American.” 

Julia struggles to find a sense of national identity, realizing toward the end of the novel that her identity may be split between France and America.