France:  a place with a passion for all things—vintage wine, aged cheese and enduring hypocrisy. 

Case in point:  Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent proposal that will allow French children to learn about the Holocaust in a way that could be called, “tres Ann Frank.”  The young Dutch victim of Nazi inhumanity has demonstrated a perpetual draw for teenage girls and boys. All over the world, in scores of translations, young readers have absorbed the diary of this teenager, someone with whom they can identify, a regular young person just like the reader.

Sarkozy’s suggestion that each French student study a French schoolchild who was deported is nothing short of brilliant.  It’s an extraordinarily sensitive and well-judged manner in which students can see beyond columns of statistics and jackboots.  They can see the result of war, the young victims as the individuals they were:  kids who went to the same schools as French children today, kids who sat in the same classrooms and walked the same streets of France with their friends.  Given France’s acute role in the deaths of so many schoolchildren, Sarkozy’s suggestion is also extremely appropriate.  To study history is to study facts, not air-brushed slections.  Many of those “facts” had faces, names and hopes.

From France alone, 11,402 children were deported.  Only 300 escaped death.  Teaching the Holocaust in a way that makes children understand it is not a far-fetched, isolated incident is teaching truthfully and well.  After all, this is far from a distant drama.  It isn’t something that “couldn’t possibly happen today,” because those who went through it said exactly the same thing during the incremental –and eventually homicidal—persecution of Jews:  “This isn’t possible.” 

Sarkozy is realistic, honest and has the foresight as well as the hindsight, to help his country move from a tainted past into an enlightened future.

In doing so, he is the exception that proves the rule.  France is a country that readily complied with the Nazis.  In fact, they went above, beyond and faster than what the Germans demanded.  After taking the first census of Jewish residents in France since the late 1800’s, they handed over every name and address to the German occupiers.    

The French government appointed special units of French gendarmes as vicious and cruel as members of the Gestapo.  The Vichy regime, headed by Pierre Laval, wanted France to secure a prominent place in Nazi Germany’s new European order. 

Before any pressures from the Third Reich, France set up laws permitting anti-Semitic propaganda, banning Jews from professions, schools, public offices, revoking French naturalization papers form foreign born Jews, and allowing the French police to arbitrarily arrest any foreign born Jew.  French concentration camps were set up in the same pre-demand fashion.

On the subject of Nazi demands, when the order to arrest and deport to labor and death camps all French adults of Nazi-defined Jewish heritage, the French, not only quickly cooperated, they pushed for the deportation of every child as well.  Such virulent French anti-Semitism has for decades tried to pass itself off as following German orders. In the case of throwing children into the Nazi killing system, they explained their reasoning thus:  to separate children from deported parents would be “traumatic.” 

It’s a matter of course that the French school children of today will learn about World War II and the Holocaust.  So why is Sarkozy’s  suggested manner of learning a la Ann Frank, being loudly rejected by the French public?

The French government’s culpability is already well-documented.  What prompts this stressful, desperate opposition?  Do these protesters feel guilty?  Are they ashamed of their own parents’ inaction that allowed neighborhood kids to be towed away?  Are they worried about traceable familial collaboration?   

Nope. 

They say that teaching in a way that is so personal would “traumatize” children. 

Let’s examine this impulsive obsession with shielding French children from trauma, even by recounting public, government-sactioned events as they happened.

If the French are so preoccupied with the safety of its youngsters, why did they aid in the planning of and participate in July of ‘42’s massive round-up of Parisian Jews of all ages and herd them into the unventilated Veledrome d’Hiver  to suffer, some to the point of death, the intense heat of mid-July, thirst, hunger, and immeasurable fear?

If the French cared about its young ones, why did they direct the SS to orphanages full of hiding children whose parents had been sent to concentration camps?

If the French were so cautious about the well-being of its children, why did they slap handcuffs on kids and drag them to cells?

If the French cared about sheltering their kids, why did they shave the heads of interned children so that their lovely ringlets could be used for wigs and linings for winter coats?

If the French wanted to avoid traumatizing their children, why did they assign brutal French guards to preside over gruesome holding camps where the newly bald youngsters wasted away for lack of food or water, covered with sores and weak from illness?  

If the French are so concerned with saving their children from trauma, why is it that when the Nazis demanded every adult, the French response was, “You want kids with that?”  

Sarkozy’s suggestion that French schoolchildren learn about the kids who were deported is considered an outrage because it would be “traumatizing” to learn such things.  In the words and beautiful simplicity of my teenage daughter’s comrades, “Oh, puh-leeze.”  If they think reading about other children is traumatizing, what were they thinking when they shoved toddlers and teenagers into boxcars and sent them crying to Auschwitz? 

This public outcry is just another French farce.  It has nothing to do with protecting French children from trauma.  It’s the adults trying to protect themselves. 

These protesters, (along with a handful of vocal individuals who will jump on any bandwagon to be part of a protest), are wholly terrified—perhaps to the point of trauma—that their own children will find out the truth.  They will find out the truth that sits behind the numbers and dates, the statistics, the chronology of events that comprise  WWII which must be memorized for an exam.  They’re afraid their children –and grandchildren–  will find out what really happened to those deported and murdered French children.  They’re shaking in their chemises that 13 year old Marie and 15 year old Pierre will find out the fates of other young Maries and Pierres who played in the same playgrounds, lived in the same neighborhoods, had the same daydreams, and feared the same monsters. 

The difference is, for those kids who were murdered, the monsters were real:  they were the French leaders and citizens who were supposed to protect them.

Serge Klarsfeld’s books offer hundreds of photos and bios of deported youngsters, making the materials for this educational venue entirely available. 

Sarkozy is the extraordinary example of a French leader with heart: the exception that makes the rule. 

Vive la difference!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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