France’s wartime cooperation with the Nazi Holocaust has become the latest front in President Sarkozy’s struggle to impose his ideas on an increasingly recalcitrant nation.

The President has stirred up a hornet’s nest with an instruction that every ten-year-old pupil should know the identity of one of the 11,000 Jewish children who were deported from France to their deaths at Nazi hands.

“The children must know the name and life story of a child who died in the Shoah,” Mr Sarkozy said.

The order, announced at a dinner on Wednesday with Jewish leaders, has been attacked by Mr Sarkozy’s opponents as a self-serving diversion at a time when he is wallowing in unpopularity after his marriage to Carla Bruni, the Italian super-model.

It is also being linked with Mr Sarkozy’s controversial embrace of religious values. Jewish on his mother’s side and a nonpractising Catholic, Mr Sarkozy has come close to breaching France’s century-old barrier between government and religion.

Jewish leaders have given his order a cautious welcome. Serge Klarsfeld, the veteran Nazi-hunter, called it “a good way to talk about this tragedy”.

Teachers, child experts, parents and Jewish intellectuals are unimpressed. “This is completely out of line,” said Marie-Odile Rucine, chief paediatrician for Paris public hospitals. “It is an aberration from the psychological point of view.”

The teachers accused Mr Sarkozy of dangerous meddling. “How can one understand this idea of weighing down such young children with the memory of a dead Jewish child?” said Luc Berille, leader of UNSA, the left-wing main teachers’ union.

The strongest Jewish criticism of Mr Sarkozy’s Holocaust order came from Simone Veil, a former Cabinet minister who survived deportation as a child. She said that it was disgraceful and unjust to inflict such a duty on schoolchildren Pascal Bruckner, an influential writer-philosopher, said that Mr Sarkozy was exploiting France’s guilt over its collaboration with the Germans in deporting 75,000 Jews. Since President Chirac recognised the crimes of the occupied state in 1995, the Holocaust has been taught in schools, and survivors visit classrooms. France now marks an annual Holocaust memorial day.

In a reminder of France’s continuing unease with its wartime record, the widow of the late President Mitterrand has delivered a fierce attack on a new TV drama about his period working for the Vichy regime. Danielle Mitterrand said that Mitterrand at Vichy blackened his name.

Mr Sarkozy’s idea springs from his belief that French children must become more involved in their country’s history, especially with the wartime generation dying out. He earlier stirred charges of exploitation when, on taking office last May, he decreed that all secondary schools must annually read to their pupils a letter from Guy Môquet, a 17-year-old resistance fighter, on the eve of his execution by the Germans in 1942.

The Holocaust order has also caused confusion because it appears to contradict Mr Sarkozy’s line during his election campaign. He won right-wing support but raised eyebrows by arguing then that France should shed its “culture of repentance” because it had “never committed a crime against humanity” during the occupation.

Henry Russo, an historian, wrote in Libération, the left-wing newspaper, that for Mr Sarkozy “the past has become a depository of political resources where everyone can pick what they want to serve their interests”.

Mr Sarkozy’s supporters note that he has always been deeply attached to the power of history and faith and that he set this out in his book The Republic, Religions, Hope, published in 2004. In his speech to Jewish leaders, Mr Sarkozy said that France should be secular but positive about religion.

Vichy’s collaboration

— In October 1940 in the “Montoire interview”, Philippe Pétain, the Vichy Chief of State, agreed collaboration with Adolf Hitler

— On August 20, 1941, French police proceeded to arrest every male Jew aged between 18 and 50

— In 2006 the French state and railway operator SNCF were found guilty of colluding to deport Jews and ordered to pay compensation

Source: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

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