Simone Veil remembered by Robert Badinter

13 July 1927 – 30 June 2017
The former justice minister and fellow Holocaust survivor recalls the French politician who became a symbol of forgiveness

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Simone Veil and I were born just a few months apart, in the late 1920s. Both teenagers during the war, we shared the same sensibility and convictions even though we didn’t belong to the same political family. But even more than I admire the politician, I admire the woman. I lost my father in the concentration camp of Sobibór but what she had to live through was much crueller. As I contemplate my own mortality, my esteem for her only grows.

Simone was 16 when she and her family were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. In January 1945, on the death march from the camp, her mother died in her arms. As for her father and brother, transferred to another camp, they never returned.

Had she run for the French presidency there's no doubt in my mind that she would have won

Continue reading... December 17, 2017 at 01:30PM