Rebirth of Holocaust survivor
SIMONE VEIL’s family were slaughtered in the Holocaust, but she survived to become the minister of health who persuaded France’s National Assembly to legalise abortion, the first Catholic country to do so. From 1979 to 1982 she was the first president of the elected European Parliament.
Throughout her life she bore the number – 78651 – tattooed on arrival at Auschwitz, although she usually wore long sleeves to disguise it.
“I found myself thrown into a universe of death, humiliation and barbarism,” she wrote. “I am still haunted by the images, the odours, the screams, the humiliation, the blows and the sky, ashen with the smoke from the crematoriums.”
Simone Annie Jacob was born in Nice, one of four children of André Jacob, an architect, and Yvonne Steinmetz. As German forces overran France the family went into hiding and almost escaped deportation with false papers.
But two days after Veil took her baccalaureate in 1944 the Germans arrested the entire family, except for her sister Denise who had joined the Resistance. Her father and brother Jean vanished for ever, last seen on a transport to Lithuania.
Veil, her mother and her sister Milou were deported to Auschwitz before being sent to Bergen-Belsen where Yvonne died of typhus shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. The sisters survived, as did Denise who had been imprisoned in Ravensbrück, although Milou was to die in a car crash in the 1950s.
At the age of 19 she married Antoine Veil, brother of a fellow inmate at Auschwitz, who became a senior civil servant and head of the airline UTA. She gave birth to three sons, after which she graduated in law from the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, becoming a magistrate in 1956 before joining the Ministry of Justice.
When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became president in 1974 prime minister Jacques Chirac persuaded Veil to take the Ministry of Health.
It was there she reformed France’s laws on abortion, in spite of being attacked in the most despicable way for sending children “to the ovens”, a barb which reduced her to tears. She also made it legal for women to gain access to birth-control pills. Veil was not only popular but exuded a moral authority unusual for most politicians. Even so, when Giscard replaced Chirac in 1977 he went for the more politically experienced Raymond Barre.
Two years later Veil was elected as a member of the European Parliament and was voted in as its president, which she served as until 1982. As well as being the first president of the elected parliament she was the first female in the role since the Parliament, initially unelected, was created in 1952. In 1981 she won the Charlemagne Prize. She stood down in 1993.
Throughout her lifetime she received honours including Honorary Dame of the British Empire in 1998. She is survived by two of her three sons, the other, Claude-Nicolas, died in 2002. Her husband Antoine died 11 years later.