Paris: Some fainted in the scorching July heat, and many more wept as Simone Veil’s coffin was carried up to the Pantheon, France’s burial place for some of its most illustrious citizens.
But for the thousands who gathered on the heights of the city’s left bank on Sunday, there was pride, gratitude and a word on all their lips: ”Merci.” They wanted to thank Veil, a Holocaust survivor and women’s rights champion who became the fifth woman to be interred among the country’s greats, one year after her death at 89.
For the children who came with their classmates or their parents, she was first and foremost a Holocaust survivor, the woman they learned of in their elementary or middle-school history classes, one who helped rebuild France after World War II.
Simone Jacob was 16 when she was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp with her mother and a sister in March 1944. They were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen. She lost her parents and her brother in the Nazi camps, and forever bore the mark of deportation, her camp number tattooed on her left arm.
On Sunday, that number — 78651 — was displayed on giant screens next to the street along which Veil’s funeral procession ran. Children asked what it meant; Macron called it a symbol of Veil’s “untouchable dignity.”
Many of those children were dressed in shirts and suits to honor her, and if they were not filming or clapping, they were posing for photographs with signs that read “Merci, Madame,” or “Today I can’t, I have to go to the Pantheon.”
Read the article by Elian Peltier in The Sydney Morning Herald.