Sarah's Key

Last night I finished reading this book for my book club. This was an excellent book.

It is a about the, Vel' d'Hiv, July 16, 1942 over 13,000 Jewish families in France, including French citizens were rounded up in Paris. They were held for days in a warehouse with no food or water before being sent to concentration camps. This book is the story of a 10 year little girl who survives.

I finished this book late last night and after hardly sleeping I woke up completely depressed. I feel this horrible heavy weight and I just keep thinking "how", "why?", etc. This is not that different from how I felt for weeks after the school shooting in Connecticut. It's a horror that is simply too much to comprehend, too much to process.

It amazes me how different tragedy seems to effect me now that I'm a mother. Obviously these are events that upset everyone regardless if they have children and I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. But I know for me personally it's different. These things have always upset me but now I can't help but imagine if it were my child and then that image just seems to haunt me.

I think as parents we think our child's safety and well being is in our control. If we love them, cuddle them, dress them warmly, feed them healthy foods, play with them teach them we can control the situation. But I see these things, read these things and it's a horrifying reminder of how much isn't in our control. I read a book like this and think it's by the grace of God that we don't live in one of the all too frequent points of history where a mother had much less control over the well being of her child. And in the end I have to believe that for the children, the mothers and all the people who suffered in these unspeakable ways God was there to great them. That God and beautiful angels held those little children in their arms, made everything okay and brought them to their parents and somehow they where whole again.