(Jewish Group) How a Holocaust survivor helped win the fight for abortion rights
Five years ago, the individual repeatedly named the most admired woman in France died at the age of 90. So admired that, just a year after her death, her remains were moved to the Panthéon, the final stop for those grands hommes et femmes whose lives have contributed to the French nation’s glory.
During her long life, however, Simone Veil had not always been greeted with admiration. In 1979, for example, a gang of thugs from the antisemitic and anti-immigrant Front National, led by its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, tried to break up a meeting where she was speaking, Veil stared them down: “Vous ne me faites pas peur. J’ai survécu à pire que vous.” (“You don’t scare me. I’ve survived worse than you.”)
Worse, no doubt, had been her experience as a 16-year-old French Jew in occupied France; she was arrested and deported with the rest of her family to Auschwitz. While Veil, with two sisters, indeed survived, her father, mother and brother did not.
Upon her return from to France in 1945, she went to law school, a relatively rare feat for a woman then. Veil soon moved to the judiciary and did something even rarer: She defended the rights of Algerians during its war of independence against France, moving prisoners from Algeria, where they faced torture by the French military, to prisons in France.
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