Still Hope for Humanity

Walking through the Holocaust museum in Washington DC you come to narrow black door at the end of a narrow black hallway. You open it and stand on a round platform, there is a small square of light maybe one hundred feet up in the ceiling the sunlight is so distant so haunting like the last ember of a fading fire. You stand in awe and wonder was there ever a small child in a concentration camp gazing up at the sliver of light in the sky holding on to barley anything at all, or a mother letting the light carry her away from all of the horrifying, barbaric cruelty in the world for just a moment of hope.

Its presence makes our fight for survival, our strength and ourselves. Hope can be religion or security but most of the time its you. Your perseverance inspires other people and yourself to keep moving, keep living, keep hoping and to carry on in the most awful times. Humans can be barbaric, monstrous and there is weakness but there is courage and love and strength also. There is good left in people and in the world, to hold on to, there has to be.

In Sarah's Key, a overlooked, under-written about aspect of a compelling and important time in history is brought to light. In 1942, war is brewing in Paris and police round up 13,000 french jews in the night that are held in the Velodrome d'Hiver stadium. Its's a little bit like the Hurricane Katrina survivors in the Superdome but much more awful. They are held for six days with no food and water before being forced out to Auschwitz and gassed to death.

We follow two stories, Sarah, a little girl in Paris who is rounded up with the other people held in the stadium, and Julia, a journalist  in "that dreaded age between forty-five and fifty, that no-mans land of sag, oncoming wrinkle and stealthily approaching menopause." Julia's plot was rather whiny and dull like a low budget chick-flick about a strangely miserable yet content middle aged woman trapped in a marriage. Sarah's plot-line however was so much more weighty, real and poignant. As the police come for her family she locks her little brother in a secret cupboard promising and believing that she will come and get him shortly. She keeps the key as a reminder of both her brother and the old life Sarah so longs for for she would never be coming back.

Through much of her story, Sarah is in physical pain and mental desperation. The long marches, the filth, the pungent death she witnesses it all and bears burdens that no child or person should have to bear. So Sarah is left  taking care of her ghostly mother and father always away trying to take matters into his own hands, she is always giving more than she has to offer of herself. Who is there to take care of Sarah, the helplessness, the solitude even among dozens of other faces it get to us, it gets to her; She is losing her innocence and her childhood is slipping away, left in the dust while she carries her family physically and mentally on the long march to Auschwitz. So what is there to hold on to when all the joy has faded at the edge of sanity, the key.

Sarah always carries the key and when the road is long and her feet grow weary she pulls it out imagines she is holding her little brother, his smiling face. Its difficult to remember what he looks like now, when life is so miserable. She doesn't know if her brother got out or if he is wasting away iet he darkness of the cupboard all she has is her earnest hope and blind fate.The key is her brother, her family, the bustle of Paris, life before the round up and most importantly a way out of the suffering. Even if Sarah never gets out, the key will always unlock a door to her old life in her mind and is the sliver of hope she need to carry her family and herself to the end.

The key will stay with Sarah when all else is dead and gone until her last dying day even through she makes it to freedom, she escapes the events in the Vel d'Hiv roundup will haunt her forever.