Interview by David Reinharc.
Minister, President of the European Parliament, member of the Constitutional Council, General de Gaulle, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, François Mitterrand, Nicolas Sarkozy, she has lived forty years in the heart of the French and European policy .
To mark the release of "A Life (Stock), his long-awaited autobiography, where it is told in first person, she agreed to receive The Jerusalem Post.
Maintenance, therefore, a woman with an exceptional destiny, which she reviews Nice, his childhood, his reading, memory and memory Polish Jews, or the film The Sorrow and the Pity .
Pain outcrops in the expression of his itinerary, in a book written so far this century which has survived the crime of being born.
Reinharc David: What a welcome was given your book "A Life"?
Simone Veil: I did not expect the considerable success that this book was (note: 500 000 copies already sold).
I receive many letters and proportionally, there are more Jews among those who write - mostly former deportees. The Jewish public feels most concerned.
DR: In reading your book, you can feel how the deportation has helped to change your worldview.
When have you felt that a "trap was closing in on you?
SV: I lived in Nice. My father was an architect and my parents had thought it would be easier for business as we settled in this region. After the 1929 crisis, we stopped building.
For once, the 31 or 32, we had to move to a smaller apartment.
Our building faced a Russian church, reproduction of a church in Red Square, built for the Tsar's visit to France. We were close to the campaign and I particularly liked this environment.
In an identity check, a furtive glance at my ID card of two Germans in civilian clothes was enough to denounce me as a Jew. A tragic contests the circumstances then allowed the worst to break into my life.
DR: You deal in your book of Jewish memory and memory in Poland.
Poland would she seized the ball on the rebound of the Holocaust for Jews to live under the constant threat of its citizens?
SV: Before Auschwitz, the Poles, in all sectors of society, preparing to pounce on the Jewish community.
There were pogroms in Poland after the Holocaust. (Note: there was a pogrom in Kielce in particular, in 1946).
I knew a young woman Polish Jew who refused to come to France at the end of the war, and, thinking that things began to change, despite the fact that Polish Jews felt their homeland to escape under their feet when the Germans put in motion the Final Solution, decided to stay.
She was murdered in a pogrom.
DR: You said to have retained the feeling that during the war, "the Jewish community had little involvement.
This neglect of the Jews deported to Auschwitz, he was also the work for you, not only the world but also your co-religionists?
SV: There's always a feeling of guilt. I feel, it's true that the Jewish community has little involved, at least directly, in the moral and material assistance that the survivors could expect.
Yes, for many of us, this was a period of complete isolation.
I do not think the community has reached out to those who, out of the camps, were facing the attempt to regain a place in society.
DR: Do you share the opinion by Aharon Appelfeld which victims do not fare and live their lives with the Holocaust?
SV: Yes. I see two very good friends of deportation, we only talk about that.
It always comes back.
DR: We know that your family was very republican and secular. Is
through books, you have thorough knowledge of your membership in the Jewish community?
SV: My father watched my reading and I could not bear to read these "little novels" in which young girls my age reveled.
He ran my reading Tolstoy, Montherlant, Montaigne and Racine, he insisted that I attend real literature, both classical and modern, Zola, Anatole France.
DR: Now, what do you read?
SV: I read some literature, but I have a library filled with three-quarter pounds of deportees on the Holocaust and the deportation.
Like many major American novels, especially Philip Roth, including " The plot against America , "a novel in which he tells what lived and felt his family was exercised during the years when the presidency of Charles Lindbergh, when the Jews had then good reason to fear the worst.
I read many books on the Holocaust. I can not get out. These last two nights, I read a book on the testimony of six former prisoners who tell their deportation. Imre Kertész
is a writer who marks me as deeply.
DR: Why did you oppose the distribution of Sorrow and the Pity, while you sit on the Board of Directors ORTF?
SV: Take the example of Clermont-Ferrand, a city where a large number of students and intellectuals had joined the Resistance, where many of them were arrested, and many deported or shot. However, Clermont-Ferrand was presented in the film as an example of collaboration.
I saw the plaque at the University of Strasbourg - which was then transferred to Clermont-Ferrand in memory of those students.
Proof, if needed, that The Sorrow and the Pity was done by people who had accounts personal address.
For, whatever the authors of this film, all the countries occupied by the Nazis in France is, by far, the one where the arrests were, in percentage terms, fewer.
Three quarters of the Jewish population living in France had escaped deportation while the Dutch Jews were eliminated more than eighty percent. In Greece, there is nothing left of the Jewish community of Salonika.
DR: What movie about the Holocaust you seem not to testify shortcuts false?
SV : I found the film interesting Holocaust since he restored the spirit of French Jews or Germans, "it can not happen to us, it is good or good French Germans. Not us. "I did not like
Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, with this ridiculous happy ending which closes the film. I say in my book, no child has ever been found in a camp next to his father, and none has had a remote release similar to that presented in the film.
Schindler's List caricature as historical reality: fifty people, at most, have benefited from the courageous actions of Schindler. But films like
Lacombe Lucien , Night Porter, Sophie's Choice are works that I find even more disturbing because the images are inaccurate implausible. And then there
Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. It's a wicked with the Poles, again ...
Claude, I think, remained in his film. It is not released.
DR: You've been affected, from 1957 to 1964, at the direction of the prison. This militancy
for prisons has she related to your experience of deportation?
Prison conditions today Have you think changed for the better?
SV: When I was assigned to the direction of the prison, I remember two German prisoners in France. Their death sentence was commuted, they fell within the limits of the possible parole. We called to say they sought the records of the last two German prisoners in France. I have dealt with these cases responded like the others. When I back, I noticed that both files had remained hidden under the battery ... The type of the act failed.
Probably because of the deportation, did I, that said, developed an extreme sensitivity to anything that, in human relationships, creates humiliation and lowering the other.
The conditions of detention today is a disgrace.
must make a considerable financial effort. It is humiliating to cram people into a room. I always thought the worst thing is humiliation.
It was as if the company through trying not only to supervisors punish but also to humiliate.
I sometimes had the surprise of discovering particularly perverse practices.
DR: In the furrow opened by Blum, General de Gaulle and Pierre Mendes France, you would have seen no access to the Elysee. Why is
have ever thought?
SV: I'm too independent for that. I've always been free as well as Minister of Health, and between 93 and 95, I asked Edouard Balladur to have the policy of the City, and again I remained very free. While remaining faithful to the institution. This also led me once to be in conflict with Raymond Barre, since we wanted the European Parliament, a special effort was devoted to the plight of hunger in the world, particularly in Africa. And Prime Minister then made known his disagreement with this humanitarian goal, which concerned however that financial assistance fairly minimal. Dice
the budget vote, France appealed to the Court of Justice.
President of Parliament, it was my duty to remain faithful to the decisions of the meeting who elected me.
It also earned me a real credibility to the Parliament, because I always assumed the decision by MEPs to the risk of sometimes being at odds with any particular government.
DR: Do you have family in Israel? Do you speak Hebrew?
SV: No, but I have friends.
My youngest son, Pierre-François, remained more than a year on a kibbutz. He really liked it
, thought very happy and he speaks Hebrew very well, unlike me, who speaks neither Hebrew nor Yiddish.
My first attachment to Palestine, was thinking of friends, who survived Auschwitz, who wanted to leave to settle.
DR: You, you never dreamed?
SV: No. My only idea at the camp, was returning to France.
Published in the Jerusalem Post No. 886
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