Симона Вейль: Жизнь и путь французского политика и деятеля Сопротивления.

French politician (1927–2017)

Simone Veil (simɔn vɛj; ; 13 July 1927 – 30 June 2017) was a French magistrate, Holocaust survivor, and politician who served as Health Minister in several governments and was President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, the first woman to hold that office. As health minister, she is best remembered for advancing women's rights in France, in particular for the 1975 law that legalized abortion, today known as the Veil Act From 1998 to 2007, she was a member of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest legal authority. A Holocaust survivor of both Auschwitz Birkenau and Bergen Belsen, she was a firm believer in European integration as a way of guaranteeing peace. She served as president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah from 2000 to 2007, and then as its honorary president. Among many honours, she was made an honorary dame in 1998, was elected to the Académie Française in 2008, and in 2012 received the grand cross of the Légion d’honneur, the highest class of the highest French order of merit. Among France's most revered figures, Simone Veil and her husband were buried at the Panthéon on 1 July 2018. Her eulogy was given by President Emmanuel Macron.

Simone Jacob was born on 13 July 1927 to an atheist Jewish family in Nice. Her father André Jacob was an architect who graduated from the Beaux Arts de Paris and went on to win the Prix de Rome for Architecture. In 1922 he married Yvonne Steinmetz, who had just passed her Baccalauréat and was about to start studying chemistry. André Jacob insisted that she abandon her studies upon marriage. The family had moved from Paris to Nice in 1924, hoping to benefit from construction projects on the Côte d’Azur. Simone was the youngest of four siblings, Madeleine (nicknamed Milou), born in 1923; Denise, born in 1924 and Jean, born in 1925. Her father's family had come from Lorraine, while her mother’s side came from the Rhineland region and from Belgium. Simone's family was explicitly Jewish but non practicing. "Being a member of the Jewish community was never a problem. It was proudly claimed by my father, but for cultural reasons, not religious ones," she wrote in her autobiography. "In his eyes, if the Jewish people were to remain the chosen people, it was because they were the people of the Book, the people of thinking and writing."

When Germany invaded France and the Vichy regime came to power in June 1940, the family managed to avoid being deported, as Nice had been included in the Italian occupation zone. Asked not to come to school by its superintendent, Simone Jacob had to study at home. As the round up of Jews intensified, the family split up and lived with different friends under false identities. Denise left for Lyon to join the resistance, while 16 year old Simone continued studying and passed her baccalauréat exam under her real name in March 1944. The next day she was arrested by the Gestapo on her way out to meet friends and celebrate the end of her secondary education. The rest of her family was also arrested on that day. On 7 April 1944, Simone, her mother, and her sisters were sent to the transit camp of Drancy, then on 13 April were deported to Auschwitz in Convoy 71. Simone’s brother and father were deported to the Baltic states in Convoy 73, never to be seen again, and thus assumed to have been murdered. Her sister Denise was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which she survived, and after the end of World War II in Europe was reunited with Simone. On 15 April 1944, Simone Jacob arrived at Auschwitz. She later wrote that she managed to avoid the gas chamber by lying about her age and was registered for the labour camp. In January 1945, Simone, along with her mother and sister, was sent on a march to Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where her mother died of typhus. Madeleine also fell ill but, like Simone, was saved when the camp was liberated on 15 April 1945.

Simone Jacob returned to France and started studying law at the University of Paris before going to the Institut d'études politiques, where she met Antoine Veil. The couple married on 26 October 1946, and would go on to have three sons, Jean, Nicolas, and Pierre François. They moved to Germany, where they lived in the American occupied zone. In 1952, Madeleine Jacob died with her son in a car accident after visiting Simone in Stuttgart.

After graduating from the Faculty of Law of Paris with a law degree, Veil spent several years practising law. In 1954, she passed the national examination to become a magistrate. She entered the National Penitentiary Administration under the Ministry of Justice, where she held a senior position and was responsible for judicial affairs. In 1964, she left to become the director of civil affairs, where she improved French women's general rights and status. In 1976, Veil also helped to introduce a ban on smoking in certain public places and worked on the problem of medically underserved rural areas. a position she held until 1982. In 1981, Veil won the prestigious Charlemagne Prize, an award given to honour the contributions made by individuals to advancing the unity of Europe. After the end of her term as President in 1982, she remained a member of the European Parliament; she was re elected for the last time in the 1989 election, stepping down in 1993. Between 1984 and 1992, she served on the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, and the Committee on Political Affairs. After stepping down from these committees, she served on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its related Subcommittee on Human Rights. Between 1989 and 1993, she was also a member of Parliament's delegation to the ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, serving as its vice chairwoman until 1992. In the mid 1990s, she worked to help the disabled, HIV positive patients, and mothers of young children. In response, Veil said that she, the president of the Constitutional Council and colleagues had deliberated on the issue beforehand and they had given her permission to take her leave without having to resign. Being a staunch supporter of the European project, she believed others should not "ignore the historical dimension of European integration". In 2008, Simone Veil became the sixth woman to be elected to the Académie française. She joined the Academy's forty "immortals", as the members are informally known, occupying the 13th seat, once the seat of literary figure Jean Racine. Her induction address was given in March 2010 by Jean d'Ormesson. On her sword, given to her as to every other immortal, is engraved her Auschwitz number (number 78651), the motto of the French Republic (liberté, égalité, fraternité) and the motto of the European Union, Unity in diversity (Unis dans la diversité). Veil died at her home on 30 June 2017, at age 89. Her son Jean said at her public ceremony on 5 July, "I forgive you for having poured water over my head", in reference to an event where she had emptied a carafe of water over his head in disgust at what she considered to be his misogynist remarks. after which she was interred next to her husband, who died in 2013, at Montparnasse Cemetery. The ceremony at les Invalides was attended by President Macron, Holocaust survivors, politicians and dignitaries. In his speech during the ceremony, President Macron announced the decision to rebury Veil and her husband in the Panthéon, which was done on 2018.

She and her husband lived in an apartment on the second floor of 11, fr in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, on the rive gauche. In 1983 she instigated the Club Vauban, a circle of politicians and intellectuals motivated to abolish political barriers between left and right.

In 2018, the government of France established a prize in memory of Veil to honour people who fight for women's causes. The prize is awarded each year on 8 March, International Women's Day, with €100,000 to support work in the winner's area of concern. On 8 March 2019, the first Simone Veil Prize was awarded to Aissa Doumara Ngatansou, co founder of the Association for the Elimination of Violence against Women (ALVF) in Cameroon.

A French language biographical drama film about her was released in 2022: Simone Veil, A Woman of the Century.