Free Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay

disappeared.
     
     

     
     
    I HAD NEVER BEEN FOND of the fifteenth arrondissement. Probably because of the monstrous surge of high-rise modern buildings that disfigured the banks of the Seine just next to the Eiffel Tower, and that I had never been able to get used to, although they were built in the early seventies, a long while before I arrived in Paris. But when I turned up at the rue Nélaton with Bamber, where the Vélodrome d’Hiver once stood, I thought to myself I liked this area of Paris even less.
    “God-awful street,” muttered Bamber. He took a couple of shots with his camera.
    The rue Nélaton was dark and silent. It obviously never got much sunshine. On one side, bourgeois stone buildings built in the late nineteenth century. On the other, where the Vélodrome d’Hiver used to be, a large brownish construction, typically early sixties, hideous in both color and proportion. MINISTÈRE DE L’INTERIEUR, read the sign above the revolving glass doors.
    “Odd place to build governmental offices,” remarked Bamber. “Don’t you think?”
    Bamber had only found a couple of existing photographs of the Vel’ d’Hiv’. I held one of them in my hand. Big black lettering read: VEL’ D’HIV’ against a pale façade. A huge door. A cluster of buses parked along the sidewalk, and the tops of people’s heads. Probably taken from a window across the street on the morning of the roundup.
    We looked for a plaque, for something that mentioned what had happened here, but could not find it.
    “I can’t believe there is nothing,” I said.
    We finally found it on the boulevard de Grenelle, just around the corner. A smallish sign. Rather humble. I wondered if anyone ever glanced at it. It read:
    On July 16 and 17, 1942, 13,152 Jews were arrested in Paris and the suburbs, deported and assassinated at Auschwitz. In the Vélodrome d’Hiver that once stood on this spot, 1,129 men, 2,916 women, and 4,115 children were packed here in inhuman conditions by the government of the Vichy police, by order of the Nazi occupant. May those who tried to save them be thanked. Passerby, never forget!
    “Interesting,” mused Bamber. “Why so many children and women, and so few men?”
    “Rumors of a big roundup had been circulating,” I explained. “There had already been a couple before, especially in August of 1941. But so far, only men were arrested. And they hadn’t been as vast, as minutely planned as this one. That’s why this one is infamous. The night of July 16, most of the men went into hiding, thinking the women and the children would be safe. That’s where they were wrong.”
    “How long had it been planned for?”
    “For months,” I answered. “The French government had been working on it intently since April ’42, writing up all the lists of the Jews to arrest. Over six thousand Parisian policemen were commissioned to carry it out. At first, the initial chosen date was July 14. But that’s the national
fête
here. So it was scheduled a little later.”
    We walked toward the
métro
station. It was a dismal street. Dismal and sad.
    “And then what?” asked Bamber. “Where were all these families taken?”
    “Penned in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ for a couple of days. A group of nurses and doctors were finally let in. They all described chaos and despair. Then the families were taken to Austerlitz Station, and then on to the camps around Paris. And then sent straight to Poland.”
    Bamber raised an eyebrow.
    “Camps? You mean concentration camps in France?”
    “Camps that are considered the French antechambers to Auschwitz. Drancy—that’s the one closest to Paris—and Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande.”
    “I wonder what they look like today, these places,” said Bamber. “We should go there and find out.”
    “We will,” I said.
    We stopped at the corner of the rue Nélaton for a coffee. I glanced at my watch. I had promised to go see Mamé today. I knew I wouldn’t make it. Tomorrow, then. It