Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay Page A

It had a beautiful yellow color. Guillaume sipped his slowly. He had not said much during the meal. He seemed subdued. I did not dare bring the Vel’ d’Hiv’ up again. But it was he who turned to speak to me as the others listened.
    “My grandmother is old now,” he said. “She won’t talk about it anymore. But she told me everything I need to know, she told me everything about that day. I think the worst thing for her was having to live on without the others. To have to continue without them. Her entire family.”
    I could not think of what to say. The boys were silent.
    “After the war, my grandmother went to the Hotel Lutétia on the boulevard Raspail, every day,” continued Guillaume. “That’s where you had to go to find out if anyone had returned from the camps. There were lists and organizations. She went there every day and waited. But after a while, she stopped going. She began to hear about the camps. She began to understand that they were all dead. That no one would come back. Nobody had really known before. But then, with survivors returning and telling their stories, everybody knew.”
    Another silence.
    “You know what I find most shocking about the Vel’ d’Hiv’?” Guillaume said. “Its code name.”
    I knew the answer to that, thanks to my extensive reading.
    “Operation Spring Breeze,” I murmured.
    “A sweet name, isn’t it, for something so horrible?” he said. “The Gestapo had asked the French police to ‘deliver’ a certain number of Jews between sixteen and fifty years old. The police were so intent on deporting the maximum number of Jews that they decided to ameliorate the orders, so they arrested all those little children, the ones born in France. French children.”
    “The Gestapo hadn’t asked for those children?” I said.
    “No,” he replied. “Not at first. Deporting children would have revealed the truth: it would have been obvious to all that Jews were not being sent to work camps, but to their deaths.”
    “So why were the children arrested?” I asked.
    Guillaume took a sip of his limoncello .
    “The police probably thought that children of Jews, even if they were born in France, were still Jews. In the end, France sent nearly eighty thousand Jews to the death camps. Only a couple of thousand made it back. And hardly any of the children did.”
    On the way home, I could not get Guillaume’s dark sad eyes out of my mind. He had offered to show me photographs of his grandmother and her family, and I had given him my phone number. He had promised to call me soon.
    Bertrand was watching television when I came in. He was lying flat out on the sofa, an arm under his head.
    “So,” he said, barely taking his eyes off the screen, “how were the boys? Up to their usual standards of refinement?”
    I slipped off my sandals and sat on the sofa beside him, looking at his fine, elegant profile.
    “A perfect meal. There was an interesting man. Guillaume.”
    “Aha,” said Bertrand, looking at me, amused. “Gay?”
    “No, I don’t think so. But I never notice that anyway.”
    “And what was so interesting about this Guillaume guy?”
    “He was telling us about his grandmother, who escaped the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, back in 1942.”
    “Hmm,” he answered, changing channels with the remote control.
    “Bertrand,” I said, “when you were at school, were you taught about the Vel’ d’Hiv’?”
    “No idea, chérie.”
    “That’s what I’m working on now for the magazine. The sixtieth anniversary is soon.”
    Bertrand picked up one of my bare feet and began to massage it with sure, warm fingers.
    “Do you think your readers are going to be interested in the Vel’ d’Hiv’?” he asked. “It’s the past. It’s not something most people want to read about.”
    “Because the French are ashamed, you mean?” I said. “So we should bury it and move on, like them?”
    He took my foot off his knee and the glint in his eye appeared. I braced