When Jewish families were rounded up, thrown in prison, then sent off to die in extermination camps, it was the French themselves who did a lot of the heavy work. Of course, this atrocity, including at best estimate around 11,000 children, CHILDREN, being sent to their death continues to bring shame on the generation of French men (and some women) who either did it or looked the other way. Of course it does. I have often thought to myself that there is, then, nothing that the French could do to atone for this deep denial of the humanity of others, even of young kids. But I was wrong. There is something they can do. And I never would have thought of it myself. This week President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a response to this atrocity that is so creative and potentially effective that I wonder that it took so many years to think of it. It calls on the next generation of French kids to do something that really makes sense.
His proposal is that the ten-year olds in French schools would each "adopt" one of the Jewish children, to learn about that child's life (and presumably, death), to own a picture of that child, and to keep the memory of that child alive. This seems to me like a great idea, one which will help the French turn the page on an awful part of their history. But then I was strongly in favor of the ban on head scarves too, for much the same reason: that it will foster solidarity in the people, rather than encourage ethnic enclaves.
The thoroughly predictable backlash started almost immediately. We are told that asking these ten year olds to identify with holocaust victims will traumatize them, that they are too young to be burdened with this task. My response to that is that being ten years old is so traumatic itself (Don't people REMEMBER what it was like on the schoolyard?) that this identification with an innocent and thoroughly real child would be a tonic.
Others object that we would have the effect of making this generation feel guilty for crimes that they did not commit, did not even previously know about. I think this objection seriously underestimates the maturity of ten year olds today. They know about drugs. They know about violence. They certainly know about hate. And Sex. So they can know about this tragic story without feeling that they did it. When I was a kid I always felt more secure when adults told me the truth. Stories about fairies freaked me out. Clowns terrified me. But the truth never did, because then I knew just what it was I had to deal with. The truth can hurt like a bitch, but it is always better than everything else.