French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s stunning recent proposal that every fifth-grader in the nation study the life of a French child slain in the Holocaust is a prime example of an idea that would be great — if it weren’t so awful.
At first glance, who could object? What better way to sharpen the focus of the incomprehensibly brutal blur of the Shoah than to personalize it with the name, face, age, home address and hobbies of a young victim the students’ age? It was no less of an authority on genocide than Josef Stalin who supposedly opined, “One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.”
Sarkozy made his announcement at the annual dinner of France’s organized Jewish community earlier this month. He did so, he admits, without consulting a single psychologist — or even a teacher.
His hastily devised plan to supplement France’s existing Holocaust education programs sparked an outcry from the general public: 85 percent of the French, Jews and non-Jews, oppose the plan, according to a recent survey by a French polling agency.
Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor and former rightist French politician, remained seated at Sarkozy’s dais when others stood to applaud his plan. She later told the magazine L’Express that the president’s announcement “froze my blood.”
But whatever one’s opinion on France, Sarkozy or anti-Semitism, the larger question looms: Is it wise to unload France’s complex and painful Holocaust legacy on the backs of the nation’s 10-year-olds?
“It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and, above all, unjust,” Veil said. “You cannot inflict this on little ones, 10 years old.”
I called several Bay Area Holocaust educators, and they agree. Leslie Kane, the executive director of the Holocaust Center of Northern California, told me that she attempts to dissuade schools from introducing detailed Shoah curriculum before seventh or eighth grade.
Morgan Blum, the Holocaust Center’s education director, said she receives queries from Bay Area educators who would like to teach the Shoah — yet recoil at Blum’s query of whether they’d show their young students an R-rated movie.
It boggles the mind that some would hope to plunge young children into an analysis of the darkest and most disturbing elements of human nature yet shield them from, say, “American Pie.”
“People say, ‘We’ll only read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” It’s just a diary of a young girl,'” said Blum. “But kids that age, they ask questions. Don’t bring up the subject if you don’t feel like answering all the questions.”
Last year I sat in Ben Sieradzki’s Berkeley living room. For nearly three hours, he told me about how his idyllic childhood devolved into a nightmare. How he watched the Nazis beat his mother half to death with their rifle butts and toss her into the back of a truck the way garbage men discard a mattress left on the street. How fellow prisoners resorted to cannibalism. How a friend working alongside Sieradzki in a mine was crushed in a cave-in and the man’s brains oozed onto Ben’s uniform — and remained there for the duration of the war.
When my editors gave me a word count for the story of Sieradzki and two fellow survivors, it was comically short; each survivor’s tale would have to be summed up in a few hundred words. So I ignored it. I wrote as much as I felt was necessary to tell each man’s or woman’s story — with all the wrenching details intact.
In the end, the story ran full (at nearly 5,400 words). And I am glad for it: To reduce survivors’ memories into rote tales of horror and redemption and gloss over the profoundly disturbing and visceral individual memories — in favor of a virtual travelogue of camps, death marches and more camps — numbs the reader and renders the Holocaust mundane.
Simply put, the Holocaust is not something to dabble in. To dilute the Shoah to the level 10-year-olds could comprehend would be to make it a simple horror movie or, perhaps worse, the ultimate guilt trip for a generation 70 years removed from the nation’s convoluted wartime history.
As no less an authority than Elie Wiesel recently opined, “Il ne faut ni politiser ni banaliser la mémoire” — One should not politicize or make banal the memory.
Joe Eskenazi is a reporter for j. He can be reached at [email protected].