Simone Veil

Simone Veil was born in Nice in 1927 into a non-practising Jewish family. In March 1944 she and her family were arrested by the Gestapo. Simone, her mother and her sisters were sent to Auschwitz, while her brother and father were deported t the Baltic states. Simone and her sister Denise were the only members of the family to survive. After graduating with a law degree, Veil first practised as a lawyer and a magistrate and worked in the Ministry of Justice, then served as Minister of Health from 1974 to 1979, when she was elected to the European Parliament. She became President of the parliament the same year and held the position until 1982. In 1993 she returned to the French government before being appointed to the Constitutional Council in 1998. In 2008, she was elected to the Académie Française. Veil died in 2017.