A life, Simone Veil

This is a major event. Simone Veil is finally agreeing to tell her story in the first person.
From her childhood in Nice in a completely assimilated Jewish family, and her deportation to Auschwitz with her mother and one of her sisters in March 1944, to her most recent positions, she has established herself as a singular and particularly strong figure in the French political landscape. A free woman if ever there was one, she exercised power not for its own sake, but to improve, as much as she could, the living conditions of her fellow citizens: in the prison administration, then at the Ministry of Health in the Chirac government under the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – it was there that she, against her own party, passed the law on abortion; as president of the European Parliament, where she proved capable of standing up to the French Prime Minister, Raymond Barre; as Minister of Social Affairs, Health and the City in the government led by Balladur and presided over by François Mitterrand; at the Constitutional Council as well as at the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.
True to what she considers to be the role of Holocaust survivors, she testified, whenever she could, in France and elsewhere, about her experience in Auschwitz.
But this woman of memory is never nostalgic, never backward-looking; she is only concerned with the world of tomorrow, the one she will bequeath to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who hold a large place in her life.
She has traveled extensively, met most of the world's "greats," and experienced the major events of the 20th century firsthand. She talks about it without raising her voice, but she is heard.