Simone Veil
Holocaust survivor who became a leading French politician and spent her life fighting for women’s rights
SIMONE VEIL, who has died aged 89, survived forced labour in Auschwitz and the death or disappearance of most of her family to become the Minister of Health who persuaded France’s National Assembly to legalise abortion, and from 1979 to 1982 the first president of the elected European Parliament.
For much of her career, she was France’s most popular politician. She was widely tipped to become prime minister of her country and from 1993 to 1995 she was unofficial deputy to the centrist premier Edouard Balladur. She achieved all this despite — or perhaps because of — her lack of political partisanship. She was a senior official in the magistracy and an authority on adoption law when her friend Jacques Chirac persuaded her in 1974 to become his Minister of Health.
She made it legal for women to obtain birth control pills through France’s health service, campaigned to improve working conditions in hospitals and launched an anti-smoking drive — halving her own consumption of 60 a day. Simone Veil’s election as the Parliament’s president personified the Franco-German reconciliation that had created a united Europe: she still bore on her arm the number — 78651 — stamped there on arrival at Auschwitz.
Always wearing a Chanel suit, she came to the masculine world of French politics, as it was then, with commanding personal authority, plus a determination to probe the smallest details and take every decision herself.
She was born Simone Annie Jacob in Nice on July 13, 1927, one of four children of Andre Jacob, an architect, and the former Yvonne Steinmetz. It was a studious home, Simone’s father refusing to let her go to the cinema lest it disrupt her education at the Lycee de Nice. When France was defeated in 1940, she was the only family member to dispute her father’s conviction that the country would never let any harm befall the Jews. As German forces occupied Vichy France, the family went into hiding, the girls being sheltered by Gaullists. They almost escaped deportation by obtaining false papers, but two days after finishing her baccalaureat in 1944 the Germans checked Simone’s. They were arrested except for her sister Denise, who had joined the Resistance. Her father and brother Jean were never seen again, vanishing “somewhere in the Baltic states”.
Simone, her mother and her sister Milou were deported to Auschwitz, where they broke stones for road building and Yvonne died of typhus. For Simone, the true horror of captivity was the degree to which inhuman treatment by their jailers eroded prisoners’ inclination to behave humanely among themselves.
Early in 1945 Auschwitz was evacuated as the Red Army closed in. Simone, also suffering from typhus, was forced to walk 30 miles, then put on a train crammed with deportees. It took a week to reach Belsen; on arrival three-quarters of the train’s occupants were dead. When Belsen was liberated that May, a British soldier guessed Simone’s age at 40; she was 17. Milou also survived, but died prematurely. Simone emerged from the war with a “rage to live” — marrying at 19 Antoine Veil, brother of a fellow inmate at Auschwitz, who became a senior civil servant and head of the airline UTA. Having given birth to three sons, she decided to become an advocate — having “a romantic picture of myself defending widows and orphans in court” — but her husband persuaded her to be a magistrate instead.
Her husband died in 2013 and she is survived by their sons. She died on June 30.