Au revoir, les enfants

That's the title of a 1987 French film by Louis Malle, based on an actual experience of his childhood. He spent the Nazi occupation in a French Catholic boarding school. The priests there were hiding Jewish schoolchildren from the Gestapo, under false (French Catholic) names. But an employee of the school ratted the children out to the Nazis, who turned up one day to cart the Jewish kids away. All of them died in the Shoah. Malle's emotional identification with his Jewish classmates haunted him the rest of his days.

I bring it up today in light of the NYT report that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is instituting a controversial new change in French education:

President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that the focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. Still others warned that the plan could backfire, creating resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short shrift.

“Every day the president throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence,” said Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. “But this last one is truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality. Let’s judge it for what it is: a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel.”

The initiative has also pitted some Jews against one another. “It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express. “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”

Ms. Veil was in the audience when Mr. Sarkozy spoke, and said that when she heard his words, “My blood turned to ice.”

But Serge Klarsfeld, a Jewish historian who has devoted his life to recording the list and biographies of France’s Holocaust victims, praised the president for his “courage.”

“This is the crowning glory of long and arduous work,” he said. “To those who say it’s too difficult for young children — that’s not true. What they see on television or in a horror film is much worse. This is not a morbid mission.”

Mr. Klarsfeld likened the plan to a practice by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors small booklets describing the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors.

The Times story, bizarrely (or on second though, maybe not-so-bizarrely), makes no mention at all of one of the leading causes for the resurgence of anti-Semitism in France: the Islamization of the public schools, which the Inspector General for Education in France says the state prefers to ignore:

"The minister of education has done nothing," said Jean-Pierre Obin, an inspector general of education in France, who wrote a report in 2004 that called anti-Semitism "ubiquitous" in the 61 schools surveyed. "He prefers not to talk about it."

Mr. Obin wrote in the report of "a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children — and they are alone in this case — can no longer be educated in just any school."

Ianis Roder, 34, a history teacher in a middle school northeast of Paris, said he was stunned by what he witnessed after Sept. 11, 2001. The next day, someone spray-painted in a stairwell of the school the image of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center beside the words "Death to the U.S., Death to Jews."

When he told his class months later that Hitler had killed millions of million Jews, one boy blurted out, "He would have made a good Muslim!" Mr. Roder told of a Muslim teacher who dismissed her class after a shouting match over Nazi propaganda. The students said the offensive images accurately depicted Jews.

Today the Jewish schoolchildren, tomorrow the Christians. One complicating factor in Sarko's proposal is that French schoolchildren already receive extensive education in the Holocaust. But according to this Hebrew University report on anti-Semitism in French schools, this education has done little to stop the rising tide of anti-Semitism. The theory is that if people only knew what the Nazis and their collaborators did, they would be horrified. But that's not proving to be the case:

However, it is in the twenty-year period which has seen a marked improvement in the teaching of the Holocaust in French schools, that antisemitism has flourished as never before, adopting an outspoken virulence the likes of which have not been known in France since the Occupation and the Vichy regime. The Holocaust has never been taught as well as it is today, and never has antisemitism been as robust as it is today. Yet this fact cannot be explained by citing the lack of information about the horrors of antisemitism, the complicity from which these horrors benefited, the ordeals of the forced transportation, arrests, and incarceration, the nightmare of the deportation, or the nameless abyss of the mass exterminations.

Nothing has helped. Antisemitism has continued to thrive. At the beginning of 2004, in a secondary school in the Val de Loire (in the center of France), a teenager wrote the following anonymous message after seeing a Holocaust exhibit: “This is what we feel: ‘the poor wretches,’ especially the crematoria, it’s hot in there! Great, you couldn’t escape. As for me, I’m doing well. Alhamdulillah (thank God!). It did the trick!”

France has a massive problem with these Muslim ghettoes and the children within them who are being raised as veritable Hitler Youth, and if Sarkozy thinks expanding Holocaust education is going to solve the problem, he's dreaming. On the other hand -- and this is why I support what he's doing, with the same reservations that offend Simone Veil -- I believe it is imperative to reach the hearts of the French majority, and inculcate within them from a young age an emotional identification with the victims of the Shoah. It has to do with what happened to me as a child.

In 1978, when I was 12, NBC aired the miniseries "Holocaust." At the time, I was really interested in all things World War II and Nazi. I hasten to add that I wasn't sympathetic to the Nazis, but rather simply had a geeky fascination with them and that era of history. I knew vaguely about the Holocaust, but didn't really understand it. When the miniseries was announced, though, I asked my parents if I could watch it. It was about World War II, so naturally I was interested.

The fictional program told the story of the Weiss family through the Holocaust. Of course you come to identify with them from the beginning, so when the Nazi persecution begins, you feel it. I kept asking my dad, "Did that really happen?" Yes, he said, it did. I will never forget as long as I live what it was like on what I guess was night three of the week-long broadcast. I was lying on our living room floor, with my left cheek pressed against the shag carpet, when I watched on the screen the Nazis line up naked Jews against a trench, and mow them down with machine guns. I started sobbing convulsively, and my father had to carry me to bed, big as I was.

I've never talked to them about it, but I'm sure my parents hated themselves for letting me watch "Holocaust," given how emotionally shattering it was to me as a child. But you know, that was one of the best things they ever did for me. After that, I understood what anti-Semitism really meant. That experience in my family's living room defined my beliefs about the Jewish people, the diabolical evil of anti-Semitism and the state of Israel more than anything else. It would be a good thing if those French children who are still educable on the subject could come to understand that the Holocaust was not just about facts, figures and newsreels, but about real people, people like them, who were sent to their deaths because people believed in anti-Semitism. Maybe fortifying their moral imagination in the way Sarkozy proposes will give the French who will end up confronting the Islamofascists within in a more direct way a profound understanding of what's really at stake in this war of ideas.