WEB DESK
The French politician, women’s rights champion and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil has died at the age of 89. Best known in France for her instrumental role in legalising abortion in the 1970s, she went on to serve as the first President of an elected European Parliament.
Ms Veil, a liberal, later re-entered French politics, returning to the cabinet in the 1990s. She became one of the 40 immortals of the Académie Française in 2010 – a great honour in France.
“May her example inspire our compatriots,” President Emmanuel Macron tweeted.
“France has lost a figure that history rarely produces,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said, as tributes to the centrist Veil poured in from across the political spectrum.
Veil said it was her experiences in the Nazi concentration camps that made her a firm believer in the unification of Europe.
“The idea of war was for me something terrible,” she told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview. “The only possible option was to make peace.”
Her own rise from a former deportee to the head of the European Parliament was a potent symbol of that sought-after peace, she said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, offering condolences in a message to Veil’s son, said she was “very grateful” for Veil’s commitment to European unification.
“We will also remember her tireless … commitment to the survivors of the Holocaust, whose fate she shared,” Merkel wrote.
A two-time Cabinet minister, Veil was best known in France for leading the heated battle to legalize abortion in the 1970s. France’s abortion rights law is still known four decades later as the “Loi Veil,” and she called it her proudest accomplishment.
Born Simone Jacob in the Mediterranean port of Nice on July 13, 1927, she was one of four children. Her father worked as an architect until a 1941 law by France’s collaborationist Vichy government forced him – and other Jews – out of the profession.
In March 1944, the Gestapo arrested and deported Veil, her parents and all but one of her siblings. The 16-year-old Veil, her sister and her mother ended up at the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Her father and brother were sent to a camp in a Baltic country. They were never seen again.
“I found myself thrown into a universe of death, humiliation and barbarism,” Veil wrote in the preface to a 2005 book on the Holocaust. “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.”