Imaginary interview with Simone Veil
by Charactorium · Simone Veil (1927 — 2017) · Politics · 6 min read
Paris, a bright apartment in the 16th arrondissement, late autumn. On the coffee table, the proofs of a newly published memoir, Une vie (A Life). Simone Veil receives informally, her voice steady, her gaze never shying from a question.
—Do you remember the day your childhood in Nice was shattered?
I was born in Nice in 1927, into a French Jewish family that believed, like so many others, that we were safe because we loved the Republic. The sea, school, my sisters' laughter: that was my world. Then, in the spring of 1944, they came for us. I was seventeen, I had just passed my baccalaureate under a false name. They didn't explain anything: they took us, simply, like cattle. The train car, in a few days, erased everything a young girl's life could hold of sweetness. Since then, I have never been able to completely separate the light of that city from the shadow that fell over it.
They didn't explain anything: they took us, simply, like cattle.
—You carried the Auschwitz tattoo your whole life. What does it mean to you?
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, they didn't give you a number to count you: they gave it to you to negate you. Mine, A-25220, was engraved on my forearm upon arrival, and I never had it removed. Many after the war hid theirs under a long sleeve, out of modesty or pain. I chose to keep it visible. It is not a jewel; it is a scar that speaks for me when words fail. When young people ask me what the camp was like, I don't need a long speech: I roll up my sleeve. That number says that men coldly, administratively decided to turn the living into dust. Wearing it is refusing that it be forgotten.
It is not a jewel; it is a scar that speaks for me when words fail.
—How did the experience of the camps fuel everything you undertook afterward?
I think I never really left Birkenau. You come back, you live, you work, but a part of you stays there, with those who did not return. For a long time I wondered why me, and not my mother, who died of typhus a few weeks before liberation. The only answer I found, I wrote in Une vie: "I knew horror. I could not pretend to forget it. My life after Auschwitz had to be devoted to something worthwhile." That is what kept me standing: the idea that survival is only justified by serving to protect others from arbitrariness, humiliation, contempt. The rest of my path stems from that debt.
—What did it mean, in 1974, to be a woman minister in a government of men?
When Valéry Giscard d'Estaing appointed me to the Ministry of Health in 1974, I entered a world that had not been designed for me. The corridors of power, committees, councils: everywhere men, cigars, a cordiality that could turn into condescension as soon as you contradicted them. My strict tailored suit was not a coquetry; it was armor: I had to appear irreproachable so that they would deign to listen to the substance. They judged me on my outfit, my tone, my smile, before judging me on my briefs. I learned very quickly that a woman there had no right to the sloppiness so readily forgiven in men. That hardened me, no doubt. But it also made me very attentive to all those whom society automatically relegated to second place.
My strict tailored suit was not a coquetry; it was armor.
—What were your daily routines as minister like during those years?
I got up before seven, long before the house woke, to read the press and review my files in silence. Discipline I had acquired from my law studies and my career as a magistrate: you don't improvise when lives are at stake. The afternoon was spent in meetings at the Ministry of Health, hearings, receptions for associations that brought me the real world—doctors, women, public health officials. In the evening, there was often an official dinner, and sometimes, finally, my husband Antoine and our discussions where I could become myself again. This exhausting rhythm had meaning: every hour stolen from sleep served to prepare a decision that, the next day, would weigh on the lives of thousands. You don't govern a nation's health lightly.
—On November 26, 1974, you went to the podium of the National Assembly to defend the abortion law. What was your state of mind?
At the Palais Bourbon that day, I knew I had no right to tremble. I began simply: "I come to ask you to pass a law that allows a woman to dispose of her own body." Everything was in that sentence. I was not there to advocate for abortion—no woman resorts to it lightheartedly—but to end a hypocrisy that sent the poorest to mutilate themselves in back kitchens while the others crossed the border. Before me, an almost entirely male assembly, to whom a woman spoke of a tragedy none of them would ever experience in their own flesh. I spoke of real distress, not abstract principles. That was my only weapon: the truth, told bluntly, to men who preferred not to see it.
No woman resorts to it lightheartedly.
—The debates were unusually violent toward you. How did you hold up?
The sessions lasted entire nights, and some words in the chamber went beyond political opposition to become pure hatred. Abortion was compared to Nazi barbarism—to me, who had come from the camps; I never forgot it. Insulting letters arrived at my home, my children were targeted. I held on because I held the legislative file stronger than fear: every article, every condition, I had weighed them so they could not be undone. I replied without raising my voice, for I knew that a woman who shouts has already lost, while a woman who remains composed eventually exhausts her opponents. The law of January 17, 1975 finally passed, carried mainly by the votes of the left. It was a victory, but it cost me.
A woman who shouts has already lost, while a woman who remains composed exhausts her opponents.
—Many years later, at the Knesset, you returned to this right. Did it, in your view, have a significance beyond France?
Yes, profoundly. At the Knesset in 1992, I said what I believe is at the heart of everything: "I have come to tell you that women must have the right to choose. It is a fundamental right, like the right to live with dignity." Disposing of one's body is not a French affair nor a whim of the times; it is the very condition of a person's freedom. Everywhere this right is denied to women, you find the same logic: deciding for them, in the name of a supposedly higher order. I had seen too much, in my youth, of what results from states' presumption to dispose of bodies and lives. That is why I never separated the fight for women from the broader fight for human dignity. It is the same cause.
—In 1979, Europeans elected their Parliament by direct suffrage for the first time, and you became its president. What did you feel?
The 1979 election was a moment that few people today fully appreciate. For the first time, millions of Europeans voted together for a single assembly, and that assembly chose me to preside over it—me, a woman, a camp survivor, in a Europe that had torn itself apart thirty years earlier. When I stood up to open the first session, I thought of all the dead between French and Germans, and the tragic absurdity of those borders. Presiding over the European Parliament was to embody, in a single gesture, the reconciliation of a continent and the entry of women into its highest institutions. I had no model before me: I had to invent the role as much as exercise it. Rarely has a task seemed so full of meaning to me.
—Why did this European construction matter so much to the survivor that you were?
Because I had seen, with my own eyes, where nationalism pushed to madness leads. Europe, for my generation, was not a market or a regulation: it was a promise that Birkenau would not return. Binding together peoples who had hated each other, forcing them to debate within the same chamber rather than wage war—that seemed vital to me. As president, I insisted that this Parliament not be a rubber-stamp chamber but a place of living speech, where fundamental rights are defended. Many found it slow, technical, boring. I knew the price of peace, and I knew that peace is precisely that: time, patience, tedious compromises, rather than mass graves. I never regretted giving my strength to that idea.
Europe was not a market: it was a promise that Birkenau would not return.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Simone Veil's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.