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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the father do when the girl falls ill?

2. What does Bertrand tell Julia when she becomes upset about his mother's apartment?

3. What is Beaune-la-Rolande?

4. How did the police react when the mother objected to going?

5. How long had the girl been at this new location before she became ill?

Short Essay Questions

1. What restrictions have the Jews had to obey under the Vichy government?

2. Describe the girl and her parents' departure for Beaune-la-Rolande.

3. What do the girl and her mother take with them when they leave their home?

4. How does the narrator characterize Julia and Zoe?

5. What lead does Julia get for gathering more information about Vel d'Hiv' during her trip there?

6. How does the narrator say the girl and her mother react differently to the conditions at Beaune-la-Rolande?

7. What is the opening scene of "Sarah's Key".

8. How does it happen that two members of the family do not go with the police?

9. What does pregnancy mean for Julia?

10. How are the girl and her mother treated as they leave the apartment building?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Julia is dismayed by the ignorance surrounding Drancy and Vel d'Hiv', and she finds small plaques commemorating what took place there, but mostly she finds that people have moved on, and either do not remember or do not care about the past. What do you think is an appropriate form of memorializing the events of the roundup and the Holocaust? When is it appropriate for a place to 'move on' and when is it appropriate that should time remain stopped at the moment of the atrocities?

Essay Topic 2

What does escaping cost characters in "Sarah's Key", and what do characters do when they cannot escape, from history, from relationships, from their own stories? What limits the ability to escape, in the novel?

Essay Topic 3

Debate the proposition that the parallel de Rosnay draws between the end of a woman's marriage and the death of a child's little brother in the Holocaust is offensive and demeaning to the experience of those who died in Europe in the 1940s. Or is it a way of honoring the depth of human emotion?

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This section contains 844 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample