Sarah's Key

A contemporary American journalist working in Paris investigates the 1942 Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, in which French police seized Jewish families and sent them to concentration camps. Her research becomes deeply personal when she discovers that her husband's family apartment was once seized from a Jewish family — the Starzynskis — whose young daughter, Sarah, had locked her little brother in a hidden cupboard to keep him safe, intending to return for him. The story alternates between the journalist's present-day uncovering of the truth and Sarah's harrowing wartime ordeal, as both women's lives become inextricably linked across the decades.