I'm a writer. I'm not an actress.
I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to tell her I could not forget the roundup, the camp, Michel's death, and the direct train to Auschwitz that had taken her parents away forever. Sorry for what? he had retaliated, why should I, an American, feel sorry, hadn't my fellow countrymen freed France in June 1944? I had nothing to be sorry for, he laughed. I had looked at him straight in the eyes. Sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty-five years old and not knowing.
Zakhor. Al Tichkah. Remember. Never forget.
You're playing with Pandora's box. Sometimes it's better not to open it. Sometimes, it's better not to know.
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.
How was it possible that entire lives could change, could be destroyed, and that streets and buildings remained the same, she wondered.
When you grew up in France in the 1970s and 80s, the Vel' d'Hiv wasn't part of the history program.
It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!
You get attached to places, you know. Like people, I suppose.
The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can't get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience.
I've always been a geek, so I've always used the Internet, perhaps at first for autopromotion, as many authors do.
Sometimes I get to see a movie that's adapted from a book that I haven't heard about or that I love the movie so much that I will, of course, read the book.
I think books and movies are going to go a long way together in the future. I think we writers are very important material for directors.
There are two of my favorite books, 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Gone With The Wind', that were made into movies. And I love those movies as much as I love the books. That's really rare.
I'm used to promoting books, but a movie is a very different thing. You have to go to film festivals and wear fancy clothes and try and look glamorous and intelligent when you're just terrified and you want to go home!
The girl wondered: These policemen... didn't they have families, too? Didn't they have children? Children they went home to? How could they treat children this way? Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings? She looked closely at them. They seemed of flesh and bone. They were men. She couldn't understand.
She couldn't imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn't imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for?
Michel. In my dreams, you come and get me. You take me by the hand and you lead me away. This life is too much for me to bear. I look at the key and I long for you and for the past. For the innocent, easy days before the war. I know now my scars will never heal. I hope my son will forgive me. He will never know. No one will ever know.
It is not easy to explain how I felt while I read, but I will try. No doubt you, as a reader, will understand. It appeared I found myself in a place where no one could bother me, where no one could reach me. I grew impervious to all the noises around me.
I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come.
The more I read, the hungrier I become. Each book seemed promising, each page I turned offered an escapade, the allure of another world, other destinies, other dreams.
When would he realize that it wasn't his infidelity I couldn't bear, but his cowardice?
Tatiana de Rosnay is a Franco-British writer.
