A family in Nice
Simone Annie Jacob was born in Nice on July 13, 1927, the youngest of four children of André Jacob, an architect who had won the Prix de Rome for architecture, and Yvonne Steinmetz, who had given up her chemistry studies when she married at her husband’s insistence. Her father’s family came from Lorraine and her mother’s from the Rhineland and Belgium. The family had moved from Paris to Nice in 1924, hoping for work on the building projects of the Riviera. Simone grew up with her sisters Madeleine, known as Milou, and Denise, and her brother, Jean.
The Jacobs were openly Jewish but not religious. In her autobiography, Veil wrote that belonging to the Jewish community was never a problem: her father claimed it proudly, but for cultural rather than religious reasons. In his eyes, if the Jews remained a chosen people, it was because they were the people of the Book, of thought and of writing.
Arrest and deportation
After France fell in 1940, Nice was for a time under Italian occupation, which spared its Jews the worst. But Simone was asked not to come to school, her father was barred from working, and as round-ups intensified the family split up and lived with friends under false names. Her sister Denise joined the Resistance in Lyon. Simone, aged sixteen, kept studying and in March 1944 passed her baccalauréat exam under her real name. The next day she was arrested by the Gestapo on her way to celebrate with friends. The rest of the family was arrested the same day.
On April 13, 1944, Simone, her mother and her sister Milou were deported from the Drancy transit camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Convoy 71. She survived the first selection by lying about her age and was tattooed with the number 78651. Her father and brother were deported on another convoy to the Baltic states and were never seen again. In January 1945 Simone, her mother and her sister were forced on a march to Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died of typhus. Simone and Milou were liberated when British troops reached the camp on April 15, 1945. Denise, deported to Ravensbrück as a Resistance member, also survived.
Rebuilding a life
Back in France, Simone studied law in Paris and then political science at Sciences Po, where she met Antoine Veil. They married on October 26, 1946, and had three sons, Jean, Claude-Nicolas and Pierre-François. Tragedy followed her: in 1952 Milou, her closest confidante, was killed with her son in a car accident.
She also met indifference. Survivors who had simply been persecuted for being Jews were often ignored, or made the subject of jokes. At a French consulate reception in Germany in 1950, a diplomat noticed the number on her arm and asked whether it was her cloakroom ticket. She burst into tears. All her life she struggled against people’s reluctance to accept that Jews had been persecuted by Germans and by French officials simply because they were Jews.
A magistrate who changed the system from within
In 1954 Veil passed the national examination to become a magistrate and joined the prison administration of the Ministry of Justice. She worked to improve conditions for women in prison, among them Algerian women detained during the war of independence. She helped bring to safety in France Djamila Bouhired, a young Algerian woman who had been tortured in prison. In 1964 she became director of civil affairs, where she worked on laws that gave mothers equal parental authority over their children and improved women’s rights in adoption.
In 1969 she co-wrote a book on the medical, psychological and social aspects of adoption, and in 1970 she became the first woman to serve as secretary general of the Superior Council of the Magistracy, the body that oversees France’s judges. By the time President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing invited her into government in 1974, she had a long record of quiet, practical reform.
The law that bears her name
As minister of health from 1974, Veil first expanded access to contraception. Then she took on the most divisive issue in French politics. Abortion had been a crime in France since the Napoleonic era, yet many thousands of women underwent illegal and often dangerous abortions every year, and some were injured or died. On November 26, 1974, Veil stood before a National Assembly of 481 men and nine women to propose a law permitting abortion under specific conditions.
Her opening speech was calm and measured. She argued that abortion must remain an exception, the last resort for desperate situations, and that the law’s purpose was to control it and, as far as possible, to dissuade women from it. She asked the deputies to listen to a conviction shared by women, apologising for doing so before an assembly made up almost entirely of men: no woman, she said, resorts to abortion lightheartedly. The three-day debate was savage. Opponents compared the bill to Nazi crimes, a cruel charge to throw at a survivor of Auschwitz, and swastikas were daubed on her car and in her building. The prime minister, Jacques Chirac, did not support the bill, and many of the government’s own deputies voted against it. It passed on November 29, 1974, by 284 votes to 189, thanks to the left-wing opposition, and was promulgated on January 17, 1975.
What the law changed
The Loi Veil moved abortion in France out of back rooms and into hospitals and clinics, where it could be carried out safely by doctors. It made France the first predominantly Catholic country to decriminalise abortion. In France it is regarded as a cornerstone of women’s rights, and its author became one of the most admired figures in the country, though opponents of abortion continue to contest the law’s principle.
Veil’s work as minister went well beyond that one law. She reformed medical studies, led a campaign against smoking, introduced restrictions on smoking in some public places, worked on unequal access to medical care in rural areas and tried to make hospitals more humane. Returning as minister of health, social affairs and the city from 1993 to 1995, she introduced measures to support mothers of young children, people with disabilities and people living with HIV.
A survivor at the heart of Europe
In 1979 the members of the European Parliament were elected directly by voters for the first time, and Veil headed Giscard’s list. At the Parliament’s first session she was elected its president, the first woman to hold the post, and she led it until 1982. For a survivor of Auschwitz to preside over an assembly of Europeans, including Germans, was a powerful symbol of reconciliation. She could not understand, she said, how one European country could make war on another, and she believed that a united Europe was the best guarantee of peace. She was awarded the Charlemagne Prize in 1981 and remained a member of the Parliament until 1993.
She later served on France’s Constitutional Council from 1998 to 2007, sat on the board of the International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims, and was president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, devoting her later years to Holocaust remembrance and education. In 1983 she and her husband founded the Club Vauban, a discussion group meant to bridge the divide between left and right. In 2005 she briefly took leave from the Constitutional Council to campaign for the proposed European constitution, a step that some critics said compromised the council’s impartiality; she replied that her colleagues had approved it in advance.
A Jewish witness
Veil’s Jewishness was cultural rather than religious, as it had been for her father, but the Holocaust defined her life and she never stopped bearing witness to it. She returned to Auschwitz with President Jacques Chirac in 2005 for the sixtieth anniversary of its liberation, and she spoke and wrote about the camps for decades. When she was elected to the Académie française in 2008, the sixth woman ever chosen, her ceremonial sword was engraved with her Auschwitz number, 78651, alongside the French republic’s motto and the European Union’s motto, Unity in diversity.
She drew strength, she said, from the memory of her mother, who died in Bergen-Belsen. Her life joined the story of European Jewry’s destruction with the story of Europe’s rebuilding, and she saw the defence of human dignity in both as one cause.
Last years and legacy
Simone Veil published her memoir, Une vie, in 2007. Her husband, Antoine, died in 2013. She died at her home in Paris on June 30, 2017, at the age of 89. After a national ceremony at Les Invalides, President Emmanuel Macron announced that she and her husband would be reburied in the Panthéon, France’s resting place for its most honoured citizens, which took place on July 1, 2018.
In 2018 the French government created the Simone Veil Prize, awarded each year on International Women’s Day to people who fight for women’s rights, education and freedom from violence. Many places in France, including a new bridge over the Garonne in Bordeaux, now bear her name. Her legacy is a France in which women can obtain medical care safely, a European Parliament chosen by its citizens, and a lifelong example of a survivor who answered hatred with law, reason and dignity. In 2018 France issued a two-euro commemorative coin in her honour, bearing her deportation number, the European Parliament and the year 1975.
Sources & further reading
Simone Veil obituary, The Guardian, 2017 · Obituary: Simone Veil, The Jewish Chronicle, 2017 · Simone Veil (1927–2017), Museum of Contraception and Abortion (MUVS) · Simone Veil, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.