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Simone Veil

French politician (1927–2017)

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In 1979, Veil became the first woman elected President of the European Parliament, symbolising both her stature and her commitment to European integration as a guarantee of peace. She later served on France's Constitutional Council (1998–2007), the country's highest legal authority, and as president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, where she contributed to Holocaust remembrance and education.

Honoured nationally and internationally, she was elected to the Académie Française in 2008, received the grand cross of the Légion d’honneur in 2012, and was awarded numerous doctorates honoris causa abroad. After her death in 2017, she and her husband, Antoine Veil, were interred at the Panthéon in July 2018 during a state ceremony led by President Emmanuel Macron.

Early years and family

Simone Jacob was born on 13 July 1927 to an atheist Jewish family in Nice. Her father André Jacob was an architect who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and went on to win the Prix de Rome for Architecture. In 1922 he married Yvonne Steinmetz, who had just passed her Baccalauréat and was about to start studying chemistry. André Jacob insisted that she abandon her studies upon marriage. The family had moved from Paris to Nice in 1924, hoping to benefit from construction projects on the Côte d’Azur. Simone was the youngest of four siblings, Madeleine (nicknamed Milou), born in 1923; Denise, born in 1924 and Jean, born in 1925. Her father's family had come from Lorraine, while her mother's side came from the Rhineland region and from Belgium.

Simone's family was explicitly Jewish but non-practicing. "Being a member of the Jewish community was never a problem. It was proudly claimed by my father, but for cultural reasons, not religious ones", she wrote in her autobiography. "In his eyes, if the Jewish people were to remain the chosen people, it was because they were the people of the Book, the people of thinking and writing."

Deportation

When Germany invaded France and the Vichy regime came to power in June 1940, the family managed to avoid being deported, as Nice had been included in the Italian occupation zone. Asked not to come to school by its superintendent, Simone Jacob had to study at home. As the round-up of Jews intensified, the family split up and lived with different friends under false identities. Denise left for Lyon to join the resistance, while 16-year-old Simone continued studying and passed her baccalauréat exam under her real name in March 1944. The next day she was arrested by the Gestapo on her way out to meet friends and celebrate the end of her secondary education. The rest of her family was also arrested on that day.

On 7 April 1944, Simone, her mother, and her sisters were sent to the transit camp of Drancy, then on 13 April were deported to Auschwitz in Convoy 71. Simone's brother and father were deported to the occupied Baltic states (Kaunas and/or Tallinn) in Convoy 73, never to be seen again, and thus assumed to have been murdered. Her sister Denise was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which she survived, and after the end of World War II in Europe was reunited with Simone.

On 15 April 1944, Simone arrived at Auschwitz. She later wrote that she managed to avoid the gas chamber by lying about her age and was registered for the labour camp. In January 1945, Simone, along with her mother and sister, was sent on a march to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where her mother died of typhus. Madeleine also fell ill but, like Simone, was saved when the camp was liberated on 15 April 1945.

Return to France

Simone Jacob returned to France and started studying law at the University of Paris before going to the Institut d'études politiques, where she met Antoine Veil. The couple married on 26 October 1946, and would go on to have three sons, Jean, Nicolas, and Pierre-François. They moved to live in the American occupation zone in Germany. In 1952, Madeleine Jacob died with her son in a car accident after visiting Simone in Stuttgart.

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