Survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, first president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, 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.
Raised within a united Jewish family, settled in France for many generations and for whom religion really had no place, Simone Jacob was only 16 years old when she was arrested on March 30, 1944 by the Gestapo in the center of Nice and taken to the Hotel Excelsior, German headquarters. In the hours that followed, the Jacob family was arrested by the Gestapo, with the exception of her sister Denise Jacob.
Simone first transits 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, will be sent to Ravensbrück.
Portrait of Simone Veil. France, around 1940
Arrival at Auschwitz by convoy No. 71 on April 15, 1944, Simone, who was then only a young girl, claims to be 18 years old, which will allow her to escape immediate death. We tattoo the number 78651 on his left arm. 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 be engraved later on his academician sword.
On 15 May 1944, Simone’s father, André Jacob and his brother, Jean Jacob, are deported to Lithuania by convoy No. 73. They will not return.
Simone’s hair will be cut short but not shaved, an unexplained thing, like so many others in Auschwitz. With their sister and mother, they are sent to the quarantine camp where they carry out masonry work aimed at extending the railway ramp to the gas chambers. Simone befriends other young women, like Marceline Loridan, with whom she will remain extremely close all her life.
"I wanted to grow up, like all the young people of my age. But we do not grow up in Auschwitz. At the age of promises, I lost many illusions about it. (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 her mother to the annex camp of Bobrek, a few kilometers from Auschwitz, where they were assigned to exterior maintenance work. At the «sanatorium» no call, fewer deaths, more soup, the Siemens factory watches over the 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 March 15, 1945, Yvonne dies of typhus in the arms of Milou.
Simone will then protect her sister until their liberation, on April 15, 1945, by the British army, which will not elicit "any cry of joy. Only silence and tears.
Simone and Madeleine Jacob return to France on May 23, 1945. They meet their sister Denise, the only other survivor in the family. The question of memory will arise very quickly for Simone.
“The Holocaust is not just about Auschwitz: it covered the entire European continent in blood. The process of dehumanization completed, 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 Institute of Political Sciences in Paris. She meets Antoine Veil there and marries him in October 1946. She enters the judiciary in 1956 as a senior civil servant and will be, 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.
Singular and strong figure of French and European political life, she exercises power without ever wanting it. She took the time to write her autobiography, Une vie, thus ensuring her "immortality" by entering under the dome of the French Academy on March 18, 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 will fulfill throughout her life.
Simone Veil on the forecourt, the day of the press conference on the world gathering of Jewish survivors of the holocaust, at the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, Paris IV, France, 16/04/1981
Faithful to what she considers to be the duty of the survivors of the death camps, she then testifies for the Jewish martyrs, and also on behalf of all humanity.
In the 80s, 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 its vice-president and then be 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 its 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 IV, 27/03/1992
During all these years, Simone Veil continues her fight: to pass on 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 Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, Simone Veil delivers a speech that resonates like a vibrant appeal of a survivor to future generations.
I consider it a duty to explain tirelessly to the young generations, to the public opinion of 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 opening. 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 about human dignity and others. And if a word is needed to summarize one’s life, it is indeed the word dignity that we choose today.
All our thoughts go to 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
