Judi and I saw Sarah's Key last night. The story is on one level about a search for truth and the way in which even painful and difficult stories need to be told. And this particularly painful story arises from the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of Parisian Jews in 1942--Nazi directed but carried out by French policemen and bureaucrats. The inhumanity of ordinary people is a part of every story related to the Holocaust, but it's never easy to watch. But this is less a story of mass tragedy than of one young girl whose life was forever altered by widespread acquiescence to cold-hearted cruelty and great evil. And yet there are grace notes along the way--in spite of the prevalence of indifference, hatred and fear, there are those who still can be shaken from their complicity to see the humanity in a child and find it within themselves to do the right things. And as the truth, long concealed, is uncovered, the consequences are painful but seem necessary and cathartic.
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