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French Education Minister Xavier Darcos.
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PARIS (EJP)---French President Nicolas Sarkozy has requested from his Education Minister that "every year starting from the upcoming 2008 school year, children in the last year of primary school should be asked to learn about one of the 11,000 French children who died in the Holocaust.
Sarkozy made the announcement Wednesday in his speech to 1,000 guests at the annual dinner of CRIF, the umbrella representative body of Jewish organizations in France.
French Prime Minister François Fillon and some 20 members of his government, including Education Minister Xavier Darcos, attended the dinner.
“Children in CM2 (the last year of primary school) will be taught the name and the existence of a child who died in the Shoah. Nothing is more intimate than the surname and first name of a person. Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child of his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as him," Sarkozy said.
He won a rare plaudit from the Socialist opposition over his plan. "Every time we can transmit our duty to remember, we have to do it," Socialist leader Francois Hollande told France-Info radio.
After his election last year, Sarkozy had called for a letter from a WWII Resistance hero, the 17-year-old communist Guy Moquet, to be read out in all French high schools as an example of a young man's resistance to oppression.
But that decision ran into a wall of protest from the political left, who accused Sarkozy of "stealing" a Communist icon.
In his speech to CRIF, the French president stressed the importance of educating young people in order to fight anti-Semitism and raise them so they will reject racism.
He stressed that fighting anti-Semitism "is the matter of the entire Republic and not only the matter of the Jewish community."
"Every time a Jew is frightened, it is the matter of the national community," he added.