Auschwitz survivor, former French government minister and ex-president of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, died in Paris at the age of 89.

A survivor from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where she lost part of her family, she was the Honorary President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah. She was elected to the Académie française in November 2008. She is best known for pushing forward, as Health Minister, the law legalizing abortion in France in 1975 under President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

She was born in 1927, in Nice. Her parents left Paris to settle there. Her father, André Jacob, was an architect and her mother, Yvonne Steinmetz, was a stay-at-home mother. They were four children raised in a non-practicing Jewish family: Madeleine, Denise, Jean and Simone.

When WWII broke out, Simone was arrested at the age of 16 in the streets of Nice by the Gestapo as well as the rest of the family.

Her sister Denise Vernay, a member of the resistance against the Nazis, was deported to Ravensbrück. Her father and brother were deported to Lithuania while she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her sister Madeleine and her mother (43).

Her beloved mother died of typhus in March 1945. The three sisters, Simone, Madeleine and Denise, are the only survivors of the Jacob family.

Simone Veil will wait years to talk about the deportation of her family.