Simone Veil very critical of Sarkozy’s plan for Holocaust children memory

PARIS (EJP)—Simone Veil, a Auschwitz survivor and respected personality, has fiercely criticized President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to have primary school pupils to learn the name of 11,000 French children murdered by the Nazis. “It’s unimaginable, unbearable, tragic, and above all, unfair,” Veil was quoted as saying on the website of the weekly L’Express.

“We can’t inflict this on 10-year-old children. We can’t ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear,” she said.

The 80-year-old Veil, who is chairwoman of honour of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah called “unimaginable, untenable and unfair” the plan of Nicolas Sarkozy to link every pupil of CM2 (the last year of primary school) to a child victim of nazi persecutions.

The idea was presented on Wednesday by the French president in his speech at the dinner of CRIF, the representative body of French Jewish organizations. Veil attended the dinner.

Questioned by L’Express, she declared: “They cannot ask a child to become identified with a dead child. This memory is far too much heavy to hit”, she added.

“This remembrance is too heavy to bear. We deportees ourselves had trouble, after the war, talking about what we experienced. And today we try to spare our children and grandchildren.”

She said Sarkozy’s suggestion also risks stirring religious antagonism. “How a very Catholic or Muslim family will react when they will ask their son or their daughter to represent the memory of a small Jew?”, the former Minister and former European Parliament president asked.

Veil, who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 16, came out in support of Sarkozy for the 2007 presidential election.

On Friday, Sarkozy defended his plan, saying adults should not hide terrible truths from children.

In in meetings with teachers over proposed reforms of France’s school system, he said: “We must tell a child the truth,” he said. “We do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of the country.”

“If you do not talk to them of this tragedy, then you should not be surprised if it repeats itself,” Sarkozy said. “It is ignorance that prompts the repetition of abominable situations, not knowledge. Make our children into children with open eyes.”

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