Tribute to Simone Veil, who died on 30 June 2017, at the age of 89 13 July 1927 - 30 June 2017

Survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, first president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, a politician with an exemplary career, health minister committed to the fight for abortion and activist for a united Europe, Simone Veil died this morning at the age of 89.

With great emotion, the Shoah Memorial, which she inaugurated alongside Jacques Chirac in January 2005, wishes to pay tribute to her.

© Pierre-Emmanuel Weck

Raised in a united Jewish family, settled in France for many generations and for whom religion did not really have a place, Simone Jacob was only 16 years old when she was arrested on 30 March 1944 by the Gestapo in the center of Nice and taken to the Hôtel Excelsior, German headquarters. In the hours that followed, the Jacob family was arrested by the Gestapo, with the exception of his sister Denise Jacob.

Simone first transited through the Drancy camp before being deported with her mother Yvonne and her sister Milou to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. His other sister Denise, a resistant, was sent to Ravensbrück.

Portrait of Simone Veil. France, around 1940

Arriving at Auschwitz by convoy no. 71 on 15 April 1944, Simone, who was then just a young girl, claimed to be 18 years old, which allowed her to escape immediate death. He is tattooed on his left arm with the number 78651. Simone Veil will say one day that it was at this moment that she measured the threatening and definitive scope of the negation of her identity. This number 78651 will later be engraved on her academician sword.

On 15 May 1944, Simone’s father, André Jacob, and his brother, Jean Jacob, were deported to Lithuania by convoy no. 73. They did not return.

Simone will have her hair cut short but not shaved, an unexplained thing, like so many others at Auschwitz. With her sister and mother, they were sent to the quarantine camp where they carried out masonry work aimed at extending the railway ramp to the gas chambers. Simone makes friends with other young women, such as Marceline Loridan, to whom she will remain extremely close all her life.

"I wanted to grow up, like all young people of my age. But you don’t grow up in Auschwitz. In the age of promises, I have lost many illusions.”
(Simone Veil, preface to the Auschwitz Album)

In July 1944, with the help of a Polish auxiliary at the camp who found her "too pretty to die here", Simone was sent with her sister and mother to the sub-camp of Bobrek, a few kilometers from Auschwitz, where they were assigned exterior maintenance work. At the "sanatorium" no call, fewer deaths, more soup, the Siemens factory ensures performance.

On 18 January 1945, following the bombing of Auschwitz by the Soviet army, the SS evacuated the camp. A long walk of 700 km by minus thirty degrees then begins. Milou, Yvonne and Simone finally arrive, exhausted but alive, in Bergen-Belsen. But, a month before the liberation of the camp, on 15 March 1945, Yvonne died of typhus in Milou’s arms.

Simone will then protect her sister until their liberation, on 15 April 1945, by the British army, which will not cause "any cry of joy. Only silence and tears."

Simone and Madeleine Jacob returned to France on 23 May 1945, where they found their sister Denise, the only other survivor of the family. The question of memory will arise very quickly for Simone.

The Holocaust was not just about Auschwitz: it covered the entire continent of Europe in blood. Process of dehumanization carried to its end, it inspires an inexhaustible reflection on the conscience and dignity of men, because the worst is always possible."

In 1945, Simone Jacob enrolled at the faculty of law and at the Institut de Sciences Politiques de Paris. There she met Antoine Veil and married him in October 1946. She entered the magistracy in 1956 as a senior civil servant and was, in 1970, the first female general secretary of the magistrates' union. In May 1974, she was appointed Minister of Health in the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Alone against all, she legalized abortion in 1975 and then became, in 1979, the first woman to hold the position of president of the European Parliament.

A singular and powerful figure in French and European political life, she wields power without ever desiring it. She took the time to write her autobiography, A Life, thus ensuring her "immortality" by entering the dome of the Académie française on 18 March 2010, at the age of 82. But all these honors and her political commitment will never make her lose sight of the duty to remember the Shoah, which she fulfilled throughout her life.

Simone Veil on the forecourt, on the day of the press conference on the world gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors, at the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, Paris IV, France, 16/04/1981

True to what she believes is the duty of the survivors of the death camps, she then bears witness for the martyred Jews, and also in the name of all humanity.

In the 1980s, Simone Veil became a member of the board of directors of the Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu and the Centre de Documentation Juive Comptemporaine. She will become the vice-president and then one of the founding members of the Shoah Memorial. At the same time, she was the first president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah from 2001 to 2007. She remained honorary president.

Joseph Burg, Jacques Chirac, Simone Veil and Lucien Finel at the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, during the inauguration ceremony of the renovated Memorial, Paris IVe, 27/03/1992

During all these years, Simone Veil continues her fight: to transmit the memory of the Shoah to future generations.  On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, on 27 January 2005, the day of the inauguration of the Shoah Memorial in Paris, Simone Veil delivers a speech that resonates like a vibrant appeal from a survivor to future generations.

"I consider it my duty to explain tirelessly to the younger generations, to public opinion in our countries, and to political leaders, how six million women and men died, including one and a half million children, simply because they were born Jewish (...) If the Shoah constitutes a unique phenomenon in the history of humanity, the poison of racism, antisemitism, rejection of others, hatred are not the prerogative of any era, any culture, or any people. They threaten to varying degrees and in various forms, on a daily basis, everywhere and always, in the past century as well as in the one that is just beginning. That world is yours. The ashes of Auschwitz serve as a breeding ground for it.”

Woman of conviction, woman of heart, survivor of the Shoah, Simone Veil has always been concerned with human dignity and others. And if one needs a word to sum up one’s life, it is indeed the word dignity that we choose today.

All our thoughts are with his loved ones and family.

Testimony of Simone Veil interviewed by Serge Moati in 2004 for the Shoah Memorial

Testimony of Simone Veil for the Spielberg Foundation