The coffins of Auschwitz survivor and civil liberties activist Simone Veil and her husband Antoine were displayed at Paris' Shoah Memorial on Friday, ahead of being moved Sunday to the Pantheon mausoleum, where France's great authors, scientists, resistance heroes and political figures rest.
A solemn ceremony was scheduled for Sunday, with a thousand guests invited and a speech by French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron had announced soon after Simone Veil died last year that the couple would be reburied in the Pantheon.
Veil was born Simone Jacob to a Jewish family in Nice on July 13, 1927. Her whole family was arrested by the Germans during World War II, and her father, mother and brother died in concentration camps. She survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with the prisoner number 78651 tattooed on her arm.
After the war she fought fervently for civil liberties, and was best known in France for securing the legalization of abortion when she was health minister in 1974, under then-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. The "Veil Law" divided public opinion and made France the first mainly Roman Catholic country to legalize abortion.
She also became the first directly elected president of the European Parliament in 1979.
Veil died at her home in Paris on June 30, 2017, aged 89. Her husband, Antoine, was a senior civil servant who died in 2013.
