Simone Veil
1927 – 2017 · France
Known for: Auschwitz survivor, health minister and first president of the European Parliament
“From Auschwitz to the presidency of a Europe at peace, a life given to human dignity.”
Biography
Simone Veil was born Simone Jacob in Nice on 13 July 1927, the youngest of four children of an architect who had won the Prix de Rome and of a mother made to give up her chemistry studies when she married. The family was Jewish by culture rather than by practice and proud of it: her father held that his were the people of the book. Nice lay at first in the Italian occupation zone, which spared them, but as the round ups intensified the children were scattered among friends under false names. Simone sat her baccalauréat in March 1944 under her own name; the Gestapo arrested her the next day, with the rest of the family. In April she was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz in Convoy 71 with her mother and her sister Madeleine; she lied about her age on arrival and was sent to labour rather than the gas chamber. In January 1945 the three were marched to Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died of typhus. Her father and her brother, deported to the Baltic, were never seen again.
Veil came home to a country that preferred not to hear about the camps, studied law in Paris, married Antoine Veil in 1946 and brought up three sons. She qualified as a magistrate in 1954 and joined the prison administration, working on the treatment of women prisoners; as director of civil affairs from 1964 she won equal parental authority for mothers and the right of women to adopt. Appointed Minister of Health in 1974, she carried a law widening access to contraception and then, on 17 January 1975, the law legalising abortion that still bears her name. The debate was savage: opponents attacked her and her family in personal terms, some turning the crimes she had survived against her, and it passed only with votes from the opposition.
In 1979 Veil was elected to the European Parliament at its first direct elections and chosen at the opening session as its first President, an office she held until 1982; she kept her seat until 1993 and received the Charlemagne Prize in 1981. For a woman deported to Germany at sixteen, European reconciliation was never abstract. She sat on the Constitutional Council from 1998 to 2007 and presided over the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah. Elected to the Académie française in 2008, she had her Auschwitz number engraved on her ceremonial sword. She received the grand cross of the Legion of Honour in 2012 and died on 30 June 2017, two weeks short of her ninetieth birthday. In July 2018 France carried her and her husband into the Panthéon.