A Life, Simone Veil (July 13th 1927-June 30th 2017)

A Life, Simone Veil (July 13th 1927-June 30th 2017) [1]

Reading Guide by Martine Giboureau, Professor of History

Simone Veil is a woman enshrined in French political history because of, among other reasons, her work as a Cabinet member (which allowed her to pass critical laws for her fellow citizens- in particular, the law on abortion [2]). She is inscribed in European history through her work as President of the European Parliament. [3] Her autobiography reveals an independent woman, who was sometimes sharp-tongued with the male politicians with whom she rubbed elbows, in particular Raymond Barre [4] and especially François Bayrou. [5]

’I do not care for the expression ’duty of remembrance’ : personally, I prefer the notion of ’duty of history’ or ’duty of reflection,’ which obviously takes place through the ’work’ of memory, history, and reflection.’ Simone Veil.

One might believe, in reading the table of contents on page 399 [6], that only the first four (of eleven) chapters are about her childhood, her deportation, and her return. But in fact, many other pages are devoted to the Shoah ; this summary will only touch on those aspects that correspond to the interests of the Cercle d’Étude.

A PROTECTED CHILDHOOD

Simone Veil was born in 1927 to a ’happy family’ (an assertion made in the second line of her story). The Jacob family was well-off. Her father was an architect. She was the youngest of four children, and was pampered, even overprotected, at home and in school. She received a ’rigorous and thorough education’ (pg. 13), but she was pained by her mother’s situation, as the latter was entirely dependent on her husband. As their situation became more critical, her mother became especially financially dependent. She was an atheist (and even totally oblivious to religion until the age of ten- pg. 17) even though she participated in the Jewish Scouts ; [7] she describes her father’s family as ’patriotic and secular’ and her mother’s family as ’republican and secular.’ Her paternal family had resided in Lorraine since ’at least the first half of the 18th century’ (pg. 15) before migrating to Paris before 1870. Her maternal family came to France at the end of the 19th century (pg. 17).

Simone Veil spent her childhood in Nice. The crisis of the 1930s [8] had already represented a material decline in her situation and the family moved from downtown to a neighborhood steeped in Russian culture. However, they were still able to take vacations in La Ciotat, [9] staying in a house that her father had built. She formed a tight-knit trio with her two sisters and was viscerally attached to her mother. Politically, her parents had divergent views : her father on the Right and her mother on the Left. Her mother, out of an inexhaustible compassion for others, worked hard to help German Jews, many of whom had fled to Nice after Hitler seized control. Young Simone felt anguished, even afraid, sensing what was to come, while listening to the testimony of these German Jews and watching cinematic newsreels about the war in Spain [10] and the situation in China. [11]

ADOLESCENCE IN THE TORMENTS OF WAR

Despite the declaration of war on September 3rd, ’Nice remained the same… family life was hardly disrupted’ (pg. 36). Upon the German attack between May and June of 1940, Mr. Jacob desired to send his children to safety in Toulouse. However, because her aunt and uncle had decided to join de Gaulle in London, [12] Simone Veil and her siblings returned to Nice. Their ’return took place without incident,’ (pg. 38) but the material difficulties intensified : there were restrictions on food and on coal but most importantly her father was forbidden from performing his job. ’Luckily, his architect friends helped him by finding him some work, but even that was marginal because they themselves were lacking in construction work’ (pg. 39). In 1941 the Jacobs were made to declare themselves as Jewish, “accustomed to respecting the law’ (pg. 41). A paternal uncle had been arrested in Paris ’during the round up of December 1941, which was dubbed the round up of doctors and engineers’ (pg. 42). He was interned at Compiegne [13] and released due to his state of health. Upon his release, Simone’s uncle, along with his wife and three children, joined her father in Nice. The oldest children of the Jacob family began working to ease the family’s financial strain. ’On September 9th of 1943, the Gestapo deployed in Nice in full force … Mass arrests began soon after’ (pg. 43). The family’s IDs were thereafter stamped with a ’J,’ a measure endured with ’a mixture of resignation, respect for the law, and…pride’ (pg. 44). Nevertheless, the family rapidly procured fake IDs before dispersing : the parents went to stay with a friend, Simone and her sister Milou with a couple of professors in the same building, and her brother Jean with another couple. Simone Veil lived with the Villeroys. Unannounced checks were very frequent, so she continued her studies at home because the director of the high school asked her not to risk being arrested (which had happened to one or two students).

ARREST, INTERNMENT, DEPORTATION

At the end of March 1944, the baccalaureate [14] exams took place, having been organized without oral exams that year. Simone Veil took her exams on March 29th and on March 30th, she was stopped in the street with her friends for an identity check. Taken to the ’Excelsior Hotel where the Gestapo carried out interrogations,’ (pg. 48) she was soon confronted with a pile of ID cards identical to her own ! A non-Jewish friend who was arrested with her was immediately released. Simone asked her to tell her sister what had happened, but the latter was followed by the Gestapo. The ensuing dragnet was particularly tragic because, by an unfortunate coincidence, her mother, her sister, and her brother were all in the building. Simone Veil and her family spent six days at the Excelsior Hotel under acceptable conditions. On April 7th a ’crowd of arrested people’ (pg. 50) boarded the train for Drancy. [15] The living conditions were much more squalid, but it was mostly anguish that wore down the prisoners, ’even though some of them were clinging to the idea of being able to leave in the near future’ (pg. 50). The fate of those who were headed to Pitchipoï [16] remained a total mystery, and the only relief was the fact that the families had not been separated. On the advice of his family, Jean, Simone’s older brother, had accepted a position working for the Organization Todt, [17] and thus remained in France. In fact, when she returned from her deportation, Simone Veil learned that her father, arrested a few days after them, had arrived in Drancy after their deportation and had found Jean. They were both deported to Kaunas in Lithuania [18] and seem to have been murdered soon after, but no archive or testimony confirms this. On April 13, 1944, Simone, her mother, and her sister Milou left at 5 o’clock in the morning from the Bobigny train station, in cattle cars. On the evening of April 15, they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Simone Jacob became serial number 78,651.

HELL

’The convoy stopped in the dead of night’ (pg. 63) ; the shouts of the SS, the barking of the dogs, the blinding floodlights on the platform of the train station, the formation of two lines… and the advice which saved her life, ’tell them that you are 18 years old’ (pg. 64). Simone, her mother, and Milou were in the ’good line.’ They discovered a new universe characterized by a ’Kafkaesque incoherence’ (pg. 69) : the aggression of the Kapos, [19] the stench of the crematoriums, and only one response to questions about what had become of those who had been in the other line : a vague gesture towards the smokestacks. And then there was the lack of sleep, the tattoos, the ’sauna’ for disinfecting the new arrivals, the random distribution of clothing recovered from those who had been gassed… ’the only humiliation that they did not experience was the shaving of their heads’ (pg. 68), an exception that no one back then or even since could explain ! Simone Veil was placed in the quarantine camp and on the ’stone Kommando [20]’ tasked with rock excavation and the leveling of a construction site onto which the railroad platform would be extended. Once this project was completed, she was made to do pointless and exhausting tasks. Within the group, the very young (Simone and two friends whom she met during deportation, among others) felt a generational divide and pressure from their elders, who always wanted to give them advice. Simone Veil also broaches a topic often considered taboo : the ’sexual ambiguity which was ever-present beneath the surface of the relationships (between the Stubowas [21]) and the younger women’ (pg. 72). She speaks at length about ’Canada’ [22] and the trafficking of items that was possible if you had something to exchange, or if you benefitted from a special friendship, as in her case, having received two pretty dresses from a deported Polish woman, a former architect. Simone Veil, who ’lived in a block very close to the platform of the train station’ (pg. 73) witnessed the arrival and massive extermination of Hungarians.

In June of 1944, ’the head of the camp, Stenia, a former prostitute…pulled me out of the line : ‘You really are too pretty to die here’’ (pg. 77). This woman not only permitted the transfer of the young and pretty Simone to a less harsh Kommando but also, at Simone’s behest, granted the same favor to her mother and her sister. The three of them then worked in Bobrek [23] from July of 1944 until January of 1945. Simone and Milou were again assigned to excavation. Mrs. Jacob grew weaker, but the work was less difficult ; there were no roll calls outside or deaths during this time. On January 18th, 1945, they had to leave on foot to join the rest of the deportees from Auschwitz and start the death march to Gleiwitz ’where there was nothing left, no organization, no food, no light’ (pg. 83). Crammed onto the platforms of open-air train cars, they were driven to Mauthausen, then Dora, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, where they arrived on January 30th. As fate would have it, she once again met Stenia, who placed her in the SS kitchen there, allowing her to ’arrange for’ a bit of food for her mother and Milou. Despite this, her mother died on March 15th, 1945.

Bergen-Belsen was ’liberated’ on April 17th but given the risk of a typhus epidemic, the camp was immediately placed under quarantine. The prisoners were housed in the SS barracks. Hunger persisted. It took a month before the authorities thought of repatriating them, five more days to send them to the border with the Netherlands. It was not until May 23rd that Simone and Milou arrived at the Lutetia [24]. Their sister Denise, arrested as a member of the Resistance in June of 1944 and deported to Ravensbrück, had returned before them.

THE DIFFICULT RETURN TO NORMALCY

The Jacob family ’paid a heavy price to Nazi fury’ (pg. 107). But the three sisters were young and had their own lives to build. Milou required extensive medical treatment. Simone was taken in by her aunts and uncles and had difficulty integrating into social life. She spent the summer of 1946 in Nyon, Switzerland, where she experienced the nightmare of both insensitive questions and infantilizing moralism. Having passed the baccalaureate exams taken in 1944, she enrolled at the institute of law and then at Sciences-Po. While on vacation during Mardi-Gras she met Antoine Veil, whom she married in the autumn of 1946. Their first child was born at the end of 1947… Simone Veil allows us to perceive a great deal of her acrimony towards those who were not deported and who did not know how to welcome, listen to, and care for those who had returned from Hell (and she notes the clear distinction that was immediately established in their attitudes towards Denise, who ’returned with the halo of the Resistance’ and their attitudes towards herself and Milou, ’to whom no one wanted to listen’ -pg. 99). There seemed to be three categories of people, and it remains unclear which one sparked the most suffering for the survivors : those who made incongruous comments, those who made humiliating or insulting remarks, and those ’with a fleeting gaze that rendered us invisible’ (pg. 97). Overall, Simone Veil perceived a ’sentiment of incomprehension tinged with reproach’ (pg. 108). But who could find the right attitude, the right distance when ’the Shoah remained a phenomenon that was absolutely specific and totally inaccessible’ (pg. 98) ?

ANALYSIS SIXTY YEARS LATER

Throughout her book, Mrs. Veil gives her opinion on the different debates concerning the war, the attitudes of the Allies, and the memory of the Shoah. Within these pages one finds a tribute to everyone who showed exemplary behavior during the war, a reflection on the necessity of the Allied bombing of the camps, and an analysis of the notion of solidarity and of forgiving those who had allegedly behaved badly in the camps, even though they were simply trying to stay alive. Mrs. Veil’s visceral (and avowed) anticommunism is clear in her remark on the solidarity which, within the communist community, was ’fundamental, and yet nuanced’ (pg. 97) but which did not prevent her from maintaining a solid, lifelong friendship with a communist whom she had met at Bobrek. She chronicles the memory of the genocide : the commitment to the truth assured by Jacques Chirac in 1995, [25] the actions of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, [26] and the national recognition of the Righteous Among the Nations [27] in 2007. Within the pages she also gives very personal critiques of the books and films made about the Shoah. What young Simone suffered in her deportation has forever forged the sensibility and the analyses of Mrs. Veil. It served as the origin of her vigorous and systematic refusal of everything that humiliates the Other, and of moral promiscuity and alienation. She believes that her deportation is at the root of her activism and of her conviction that French prisons needed to be (and still need to be ?) made less sordid and more humane. Her will to fight against discrimination is also linked to her past. She is in favor of all measures of positive discrimination and has never ceased to be an activist for the rights of women. It was also in the camps that she discovered ’the hope that Palestine represented’ (pg. 163) for many Jews (though not for her) even before the creation of a Jewish state. One of the many bases for the roles she has played in Europe is her unique background : her candidacy for President of the European Parliament, which had been newly elected through universal suffrage, was ’a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation and the best way to definitively close the chapter of the World Wars’ (pg. 211). She also mentions the Mattéoli Mission [28] and her role as president of the compensation fund for victims in 2003. Her analysis concerning the right of intervention and international justice draws its argument from parallels between the trials of Pétain [29] and Laval [30] and the legal proceedings against Alois Brunner, [31] Paul Touvier, [32] and Maurice Papon. [33] Mrs. Veil proclaims herself to be against the imprescriptible nature of crimes against humanity, considering the impossibility of a fair trial so long after the crimes were committed, in a completely different context. Her thoughts on these subjects can be found in the full transcripts of three of her speeches : one given in 2005 for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one from 2007 at a Pantheon ceremony honoring the Righteous of France, and one given several days later for the United Nations on the International Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.

PEDAGOGICAL INTEREST

This book was written with the benefit of hindsight and with the immense domestic and international political experience of its author. This lends it a certain detachment and a very strong mastery of emotion. The general details and the context are explicitly formulated, giving young readers essential reference points. Many testimonies that are accessible to students, available on the internet or in the media, recount what happened in Paris ; here, however, is a rare description of the situation in Nice, during the Italian occupation. In addition, the fact that these events were experienced by a child and then by an adolescent may make it easier for readers to empathize. Of course, the book is not exclusively dedicated to the years from 1930 to 1940, but it could be very beneficial for the teenagers of the 21st century who, always ready to complain or to play the victim, might come to understand that the absolute melodrama of adolescence does not prevent remarkable personal, familial, and professional success ! Reading the work also gives a review of the history taught in the last years of high school ! With this book it would be very easy to present thematic elements to students and build an understanding of the characteristics of key periods of the genocide : the years before the war, the Vichy regime, deportation, the living conditions (and survival) within the camps, return and reconstruction, and the successive memories of the war. It is easy to read. The author rejects all taboos, constraints, and conformity of thought : a beautiful lesson of liberty is taught on each page.

-Translated from the French and annotated by Grace Gorden, Scripps College. Edited by Julin Everett, Scripps College.

« Une Vie », Simone Veil (13 juillet 1927-30 juin 2017)

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