President Nicolas Sarkozy has enraged the French with his recently proposed plan to educate schoolchildren about the Holocaust:
Sarkozy told France’s Jewish community on Wednesday that every 10-year-old schoolchild should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child victim of the Holocaust.”
The proposal unleashed a storm of protest from teachers, psychologists and his political foes who said it would unfairly burden children with the guilt of previous generations and some could be traumatized by identifying with a Holocaust victim.
This hue and cry may be unintelligible to Americans, many of whom grew up “unfairly burdened” with The Devil’s Arithmetic and The Diary of Anne Frank
without succumbing to shell-shock. And how is one to argue with the
children’s
Nicholas Sarkozy with Ehud Olmert rights group spokesperson who said (we can only assume with
a straight face) that “[n]o educational project should be constructed
on death”? I’d love to see what a French history textbook looks like:
Napoleonic paintball wars? Nerf guillotines?
But is the real problem that children might be traumatized—or that this project was originally proposed in tandem with a call for faith to be returned to public discourse? It’s unsurprising, given the nose many of us have developed for even a whiff of the theocratic, that the French have been put on the defensive by Sarkozy’s recent speeches. But Sarkozy’s clarification is more or less satisfactory: “I never said that secular morality is inferior to religious morality. . . . My conviction is they complement each other and that, when it is difficult to discern good and evil . . . it is good to take inspiration from both of them.”
It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that the group most likely to be upset about nationwide Holocaust remembrance is also the group most due for a reminder that France is a religious composite, not a religious vacuum to be filled.
Anonymous
I would think...
I would think that part of the uproar stems from the fear that the French will have to confront the Gaulist super-myth that French Catholics protected French Jews, the two populations hereafter referred to as Catholics and Jews. There was one remarkable Protestant minister, an ethical man, his religion notwithstanding, who took truly heroic action, with his parishoners following suit. Like evil, goodness filters down from above. There were, as well, a few exceptional Catholics, nuns and priests among them, who helped. The helpers were the exceptions, Christians who somehow transcended their religious training.
The joke among us Jews is that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising lasted longer than the "French Resistance" (a historical fact). However, the French Christians were not only cowardly, but murderous, making the whole business less than amusing. Catholics were busy rounding up Jews long before the Gernman nazi Catholics and Protestants asked them to do so. It was an ugly, ugly period of which the French Christians (Catholics, Protestants) know very little. Again and again, I am moved by the French students who occasionally appear in my Holocuast literature course.. What they learn shocks and repells them. The silence of their grandparents, parents nauseates them.
Sorry to say the same has been of my English students upon learning of their own country's conduct during the Shoah and during the immediate aftermath.
Daniel Koffler
FOR THE RECORD
carl
Dénégation isn't just a river in Egypt
The French collaborators once again fighting to deny their disgusting role in history.
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