the opportunity , it would have been unthinkable for the EU not to open its doors to these countries … even at the expense of our immediate economic interests .’ 5
This ‘ European adventure was and remains the great challenge faced by my generation ,’ she would say in her twilight years , during her 2010 acceptance speech to the Académie française .
While Simone Veil ’ s journey is similar to that of many of the great pro-European figures of the post-war era , it is nevertheless distinguished by one unique trait : its European fibre is part of a story which goes back to well before the post-war period . In her memoir , one is struck by the precision with which she recalled conversations she had heard between her mother and father , when she was just a child and the dangers Europe and her loved ones were facing were coming into focus .
On the one hand , there was her father , who had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the First World War , and whose hatred for the people he only ever referred to as the ‘ Boches ’ never diminished . On the other hand , there was her mother , who , faced with the burgeoning Nazi threat , bitterly regretted that the Franco-German rapprochement advocated by Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann had never materialised . It could have prevented Hitler ’ s rise to power .
Simone Veil never forgot her mother ’ s words . Even after being deported , she remembers that she did not stop thinking about the lessons of the past : ‘ I didn ’ t understand how we hadn ’ t learned from the horrors of 1914 to 1918 ’ 6 . ‘ At the camp , when I imagined returning home – which was not something I did often – I wonde-
5 . S . Veil , A Life , 2007 . 6 . A . Cojean , ‘ Les Dissonances de Simone Veil ’, Le Monde , June 1993 .
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