France quietly buries Sarkozy Holocaust study idea

PARIS (Reuters) - France has quietly dropped a proposal by President Nicolas Sarkozy for schoolchildren to "adopt" a young Holocaust victim, an idea that the country's best-known Auschwitz survivor called appalling and unjust.

The government has appointed a committee to study how to improve Holocaust education in France, where the history of the Nazi murder of European Jews is studied, but does not include each pupil learning about an individual victim.

A government communique after its first meeting created some confusion on Wednesday because it said the session agreed "to turn the president's good idea into a teaching method," but members later made clear the proposal had been abandoned.

"What proposal?" said Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who sat on the committee. "There is no proposal now," she added.

The surprise idea, suggested two weeks ago when Sarkozy addressed an influential Jewish organization, "was buried even before we met," said fellow committee member Claude Lanzmann, director of the 1985 film "Shoah", the Hebrew for Holocaust.

Veil, 80, a highly respected politician, all but doomed Sarkozy's proposal shortly after he made it by denouncing it as "unimaginable, untenable, appalling and, above all, unjust."

Since being elected president last May, Sarkozy has made a string of taboo-breaking proposals that have sparked lively debates in France. He stands his ground in the ensuing controversy, but then lets some ideas simply fade away.

Opposition politicians denounced the Holocaust proposal as a gesture for support from France's 600,000-strong Jewish community after other overtures aimed at the majority Catholics and the Muslim community, which numbers about five million.

The proposal to have all 10-year-old pupils study the personal history of one of France's 11,100 child Holocaust victims also met with harsh criticism from teachers who said this would traumatize small children.

"All but one of us thought the president was badly informed and was somehow mislead," said Veil, who belongs to Sarkozy's UMP party and has been careful not to criticize him directly.

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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