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Simone Jacob was born July 13, 1927, the daughter of a Jewish architect in Nice. Her father was banned from working in 1941 under the pretext that Jews could not account for more than 2 percent of the total workforce in a profession. In March 1944, at the age of 17, her entire family, with the exception of one sister who was working with the French Resistance, was stopped by the Gestapo and deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Despite spending 13 months there, she survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, but lost her parents and brothers to the camps.

Simone persevered, and did not succumb to despair. After the Liberation she moved to Paris, where she continued her studies. After receiving her baccalaureate in 1944, she enrolled at the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) and then at a law school, eventually becoming a magistrate. During her studies she met her husband, Antoine Veil, whom she married in 1946 and with whom she had three children. In 1950, Veil decided to follow her husband, a high-ranking civil servant, to Germany where he had been posted.

Returning to Paris after her stay in Germany, Veil was inspired to get actively involved with her nation’s political affairs, using her training as a magistrate to champion the modernizing trend occurring at that time in France. She first stretched her political wings in an effort to convince the National Penitentiary Administration to improve the conditions for detained inmates. She then fought hard to reform adoption rights, and to provide illegitimate children with the same rights afforded to children born into a traditional household.

These early struggles prepared Veil for a topic of great controversy: that of abortion. Named Minister of Health by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974, she promptly introduced a law to the French National Assembly that would authorize voluntary termination of pregnancy. She endured a barrage of attacks, even from those within her own party, but ultimately succeeded in passing the law by allying with members of the opposition party. This victory represented a considerable step forward in establishing a woman’s right to choose.

After her departure from French politics in 1979, Simone Veil became the first popularly elected president of the European Parliament and focused her energies on promoting and continuing the integration of Europe. She expressed her perpetual hope for the future when she said: “I am placing my hope in Europe, in a Europe that has overcome hatred and barbarism to commit itself to achieving peace and solidarity between the peoples of Europe.” In January 1982, Veil left her presidency position at the European Parliament, but continued her involvement in European affairs. She served with the judicial service for Parliament, and in 1984, she led a moderate and openly pro-European group.

After spending many years with the European Parliament as a deputy, Veil accepted an invitation to return to a French government position in 1993, when she became minister of State for social affairs, health and towns during the premiership of Édouard Balladur. In 1996 she became a newly selected member of the International Commission for the Balkans, directed by Léo Tindemans, which was charged with finding ways to reconstruct a region devastated by war .

In 1998, she was appointed to the Constitutional Council, France’s equivalent of the Supreme Court. Her mandate on the Constitutional Council will end in 2007 (its members are nominated for nine-year terms), but Simone Veil will certainly continue to lead a very active civic life. She now supervises the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, and she spoke very movingly during the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last year.

As a popularly elected former deportee and Jewish woman, Veil embodies the hope for a successfully united, accepting, and peaceful Europe.

The Horror of Auschwitz

Simone Veil was unfortunately not unique among French Jews in her deportation to Auschwitz. After the de facto French government—the Vichy regime—took control of France following the nation’s military defeat in 1940, it essentially became a puppet state of the Nazis and collaborated with them on political issues, including racial policies. Military commander Otto Stuelpnagel used the attempted murder of a German officer in Paris in December 1941 as an excuse to escalate anti-Semitic actions which led to the first arrests and deportations of Jews in Western Europe.

More than a thousand Jewish prisoners left France on March 27, 1942, in the first train to Auschwitz, spreading fear and panic across the French Jewish population. The perceived “success” of this first evacuation led to an escalation in deportation actions. In July of the same year, another 13,000 Parisian Jews were taken from Paris, and held without food or drink for several days in the Velodrome d’Hiver sports complex before being transported to an interim camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris. There the Parisian deportees joined others from across the country, most of whom were subsequently sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Such deportations continued until France’s liberation in 1944. Throughout the war, an estimated 77,000 Jews from France were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.