In his self-appointed role as an avenging angel, Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal meted out retribution to the Nazis for their crimes against humanity. In contrast, another victim of the Holocaust set her eyes to the future rather than the past and dedicated her life to reconciliation, which she felt was the best salve for her fractured France.
The journalist Agnes Poirier recalled an afternoon in 2008 when she saw France’s most revered feminist for the last time. Poirier was in a café when an old man asked its patrons to stand with the words, “We are paying tribute to the deported. Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.” His request was in reference to a group of concentration camp survivors, parading down the street, carrying the French flag. Holding the tri-color symbolized their forgiveness of the nation that had betrayed them. In their midst was an eighty-one-year-old woman, the conscience of her country.
Simone Annie Jacob, born in Nice on the French Riviera, was the youngest of the four children of Yvonne and Andre Jacob, non-observant Jews. Simone did not pay much attention to her religion until the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and the Vichy regime expelled her father from his profession as an architect. The day before her arrest by the Gestapo, the teenaged Simone had completed her baccalaureate, the diploma required to pursue university studies. Simone, her eldest sibling, Madeleine (nicknamed Milou), and their mother were deported to Drancy, the transit camp, followed by evacuation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her sister Denise, who had entered the Resistance at the start of the War, ended up in Ravensbrück; her father and brother—last recorded in Lithuania on a convoy of French Jews bound for Estonia―were never heard from again. In a preface to a book about the Holocaust, Simone wrote, “I found myself thrown into a universe of death, humiliation, and barbarism. I am still haunted by the images, the odors, the screams, the humiliation, the blows, and the sky, ashen with the smoke from the crematoriums.” When she entered through the iron gate, in a stroke of fortune, a woman who helped run the camp was taken with the teen with the beautiful chestnut braids, and told her in broken French, “You are too pretty to die here. I am going to find some way so you can survive.” Her savior sent Simone, her mother, and her sister to work at a Siemens factory outside the barbed wire, and later, a position in an SS kitchen enabled her to pilfer food. The three women ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where Yvonne languished from typhus until she succumbed, shortly before the camp’s liberation. Of the seventy-five thousand Jews deported from France, the sisters were two of only 2,500 to return. In 2005, Simone explained her survival to an interviewer: “I’m often asked what gave me the strength and will to continue to fight. I believe deeply that it was my mother; she has never stopped being present to me, next to me.”
Anxious to rebuild her life, Simone resumed her studies, including law at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, where she met a fellow student, Antoine Veil. They married in 1946 and had three sons, Jean, Claude-Nicolas, and Pierre-Francois. Despite the demands of her family, Simone focused on her career as a lawyer and passed the extremely competitive national examination to become a magistrate. As an official in the Justice Ministry, she focused on improving the living conditions of prisoners and the mentally ill, two groups targeted by the Nazis. The story went that when Valery Giscard d’Estaing became president, he visited Antoine Veil, a civil servant who had become a powerful figure in the aeronautical industry, to invite him to join the government. As it transpired, the President ended up choosing forty-six-year-old Simone for the position, making her the second woman to hold full cabinet rank. Soon she was advising ministers (including Francois Mitterrand) and was involved in the case of Djamila Bouhired, a young woman raped with a bottle in an Algerian prison, who Simone brought to safety in France.
Under President Giscard d’Estaing’s leadership, Mrs. Veil spoke out on behalf of victims of communist oppression in the Soviet Union, Latin America, and Vietnam. The most inflammatory act of her career involved the legalization of abortion, a procedure that had been criminalized since the Napoleonic Era. Another Simone (de Beauvoir) had previously paved the way with the 1949 publication of The Second Sex, a thousand-page book that strongly advocated for the right of women to control their own bodies. Unlike the writer, Veil did not campaign for the legalization out of ideology, but out of humanism. She could not bear the thought that those burdened with an unwanted pregnancy were compelled to travel, either to Switzerland or to England, or to face the horror of resorting to an unlicensed abortionist. In 1974, wearing a blue dress and a string of pearls, the forty-seven-year-old Veil addressed the French National Assembly with the words, “I will share a conviction of women, and I apologize for doing it in front of this assembly comprised almost exclusively of men. No women resort to abortion lightheartedly.” In a calm and determined voice, she pointed out that two hundred thousand French women were suffering from the effects of clandestine abortions each year, and that it was time to end such suffering. After three days of acrimonious debate, the government passed the “Loi Veil” by a vote of 284 to 189. During this time, the chamber had resonated with epithets such as “act of murder,” “monstrous,” and “France is making coffins instead of cribs.” Her critics likened abortion to Nazi euthanasia; one asked, “Madame Minister, do you want to send children to the ovens?” Madame Minister wept as she heard these words. She later attacked the rampant hypocrisy, pointing out that many who opposed her measure were simultaneously arranging abortions for a mistress or for a loved one. More than thirty years later, Simone still received hate mail. She admitted having faced challenges as a woman involved in civic affairs, and referred to political parties in France as “men’s clubs.” In a firm voice, she added that being female in an authoritarian role was precarious “because the very thing people admire in men becomes a point of criticism in women.”
Mrs. Veil left the government in 1979 and became the first female president of the European Parliament, a precursor to the European Union that promoted continental unity, a position she held until 1982. The august title made her one of the highest-ranking elected women in the world, along with Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Indira Gandhi of India. Simone viewed her election as a symbol of hope: “If this Parliament has a Jew, a woman, for its president, it means everyone has the same rights. That means a lot to me.” Her platform was the reconciliation of Germany with the countries it had occupied. Afterward, she returned to politics and served as the Minister of Health, Social Affairs, and Urban Issues until age sixty-eight. Unwilling to retire, she became president of the High Council for Integration, a body devoted to the assimilation of immigrants, and in 1998, she began a nine-year term as a member of the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest legal authority. Mrs. Veil also served as the president of the Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah, France’s Holocaust remembrance organization, from which she represented the dwindling number of survivors and helped to keep the flame of remembrance lit. From 2003 to 2009, Veil was chairman of the board of the Trust Fund for Victims, a group that supports survivors of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in cooperation with the International Criminal Court. In 2005, Simone returned to Auschwitz to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of its liberation. Simone was devastated by the death of her sister Milou in a car accident in 1952 and the passing of her middle son in 2002. In 2013, Simone suffered a dual blow with the deaths of her sister Denise and her husband, Antoine. Her sixty-seven-year marriage had provided the strength to withstand the loss of her loved ones and the trauma of her past.
Indefatigable into her eighties, the humanitarian took time from her innumerable pursuits to publish her 2017 autobiography in which she criticized the long delay in the government’s acceptance of responsibility for the murder of its Jews. After decades of denial, the French state admitted its collective guilt for the crimes in 1995. The tireless crusader was similar to the Roman God Janus (from whom we derive the name for January), whose image depicted two profiles: One turned to the left to represent the past, while the other turned to the right to represent the future. Robert Badinter, a former justice minister and Holocaust survivor, in an article in the Guardian, wrote that the politician, although always aware of yesterday, turned her eyes to tomorrow. He recalled that when the “Butcher of Lyons,” Klaus Barbie, was on trial in the late 1980s for war crimes, Veil did not approve. She explained that she was not interested in stirring up the pain of yesterday, and that Vichy and the collaboration had not represented France. This stance was especially noble given that she had been the victim of post-war denial. In 1950, at a reception hosted by the French consulate in Mainz, Germany, a French diplomat asked Simone if her tattoo was her cloakroom number. The callous remark caused her to burst into tears. In admiration, Badinter wrote, “Simone had a “qualité d’âme, a nobility of the soul, which is very rare.”
When Simone Veil passed away in 2017 at age eighty-nine, President Macron stood before her flag-draped coffin at the center of the Invalides courtyard in the shadow of Napoleon’s tomb. The inscription above the entrance of the ancient monument is “To great men, a grateful country.” He addressed the great lady lying in state, saying, “You have, Madame, made our old nation better and more beautiful. Your grandeur is ours. As you are leaving us, will you please, Madame, accept the French people’s deepest gratitude.” Holocaust survivors, politicians, and dignitaries, as well as Simone’s two surviving sons, were in attendance at the ceremony. Pierre- Francois Veil, an attorney, spoke about his mother, saying, “This tribute is your ultimate victory on the death camps.” Macron announced that the First Lady of France would be laid to rest in the Paris Pantheon, a structure whose imposing dome overlooks the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris. Of the eighty interred there, Mrs. Veil became the fifth woman; Antoine was moved from his cemetery to lie once more beside his wife. Others selected for interment in the sacred mausoleum are Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Rousseau, and Emile Zola. Another, to whom Simone would relate, was Jean Moulin, a leader of the French Resistance.
Before this great honor, Simone had received another laurel when the Académie Française, the elite intellectual guardians of the French language, founded in the seventeenth century, inducted her into their distinguished body. This honor made her the sixth woman of the forty “immortals,” the name given to its members. Each of the recipients, clad in a green uniform (Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel designed hers), receives a ceremonial sword. Inscribed on Simone’s were the three phrases that could serve as her encapsulated biography: the motto of the French Republic: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”; the European Union’s “Unie dans la diversité”; and the number tattooed on her arm: 78651.