UNE VIE

At last, Simone Veil agrees to talk about herself in the first person. She recalls her childhood in the area of Nice in a family with Jewish roots, and of her deportation to the camps with her mother and one of her sisters in March 1944. In all the posts that she has occupied, Veil has stood out as one of the figureheads of French politics. The epitomy of a free woman, she has had positions of power which she never exploited to her own ends, but to better the living conditions of her fellow citizens. She worked for the Administration of Prisons, as well as for the Ministry of Health of the Jacques Chirac government under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency. In the latter function, she worked against her own political side, for the vote for the legalization of abortion. She was head of the European Parliament – where she stood up to French Prime Minister Raymond Barre. She was also state minister ‘des Affaires Sociales, de la Santé et de la Ville’ in Balladur’s government under François Mitterrand’s presidency ; She was nominated at the Conseil constitutionnel as well as to the ‘Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah’. True to her belief of what the role of the survivors of the camps should be, she has testified again and again, in France and elsewhere. If the work of remembrance is crucial to Veil, it is not the past, however, but the future that concerns her, and the kind of world that will exist for her grand-children and great grand-children who occupy such a great place in her life.