This IWD2020 we look back at the lives of inspiring women. In 1979 Simone Veil was made president of the first directly elected European Parliament—the continent’s highest elected office
LIKE the other children, she should have been slaughtered on arrival. But with whispered advice from another prisoner, she claimed to be 18, so instead they sent her to forced labour, tattooing her arm to show that she was no longer a schoolgirl from Nice but a numbered slave, awaiting death by starvation and exhaustion.
Her arrival in politics was accidental. It was her husband, Antoine, whom President Giscard d’Estaing intended to invite to the government when he came to visit in 1973. But she proved an inspired choice as his health minister. Legalising abortion was the defining defeat of the old order—censorious, hypocritical, male—in post-war France. Theoretically banned since 1920, terminations took place annually in the hundreds of thousands: secretly, shamefully and dangerously.
For years she was France’s most popular politician. She could—should, many thought—have been prime minister or even president. But she lacked the necessary tribal instincts. Instead, her political career peaked in 1979 as president of the first directly elected European Parliament. She delighted in the post’s symbolism—of reconciliation among wartime foes, and that a Jew and a woman could hold the continent’s highest elected office.
In 1979, when National Front thugs attacked a meeting where she was speaking, she shouted, “You do not frighten me! I have survived worse than you!” She had. Of the 75,000 Jews deported from wartime France, she was one of only 2,500 to return. Her father and brother perished, somewhere, in the east. But the most painful and powerful memories were of her mother Yvonne, her lifelong inspiration, dying slowly of typhus in Belsen after a 45-mile death march at the war’s end.
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