Paris (France) (AFP) – “This evening I am in a good mood, we must take advantage of it”. On March 4, 1944, Simone Veil wrote to her sister Denise the carefree words of a 16-year-old girl who knows nothing of the coming danger. On March 30, she and her family were arrested in Nice by the Gestapo and deported.

Published on: 02/10/2026 - 1:07 p.m.

Reproduced among other letters, personal objects and family photos, this missive offers an insight into the intimacy of this great figure of the Republic, survivor of Auschwitz and died in 2017, to whom the Shoah Memorial is dedicating an exhibition which opens on Tuesday.

With "Simone Veil. My sisters and me", the curator of the exhibition David Teboul told AFP that he "wanted to reunite this family" decimated by the Shoah: father André Jacob and his son Jean were murdered in Lithuania, mother Yvonne did not return from Auschwitz.

Only the three girls - Simone, Madeleine known as "Milou" and Denise, deported to Ravensbrück as a resistance fighter - will survive the Nazi camps.

“This family is French, assimilated, but all its members had to endure the different German camps. So when I hear that Vichy would have protected French Jews, it makes me angry,” notes David Teboul, who met Simone Veil in 2000, devoted books and documentaries to her and, after her death, collected dozens of letters and photos from her family.

Through this exhibition, this documentarian says he wants to focus on the intimate and go beyond the "official figure" of Simone Veil, "pantheonized" in 2018 after having notably supported the legalization of abortion in 1975 as Minister of Health.

In the letter of March 4, 1944, we discover that the young Simone Veil is a great reader. “I read I don’t know how many books at a time, more or less attractive in fact,” she wrote to Denise, citing Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in particular, which she considered “tasteless and poorly translated.”

"Silence"

To bring these letters to life, David Teboul projects in the spaces of the Memorial certain epistolary exchanges read by three actresses: Marina Foïs plays Simone Veil; Isabelle Huppert lends her voice to “Milou”, who died in a car accident in 1952, and Dominique Reymond plays Denise, with an unknown fate.

“Men have had a monopoly on history for a long time, but there were many women involved in the Resistance movements and Denise was one of them,” he explains.

Liaison agent, Denise was arrested in Lyon where she lived alone, underwent German interrogations without ever breaking down and was deported to Ravensbrück. “She is an extraordinary woman who voluntarily remained in the shadows,” says Mr. Teboul.

According to him, Simone and Denise, who died in 2013, talked a lot together about deportation but very rarely, if ever, about their deportation, one to Auschwitz, the other to Ravensbrück.

“There was a silence in relation to the pain. Denise was extremely cautious and did not want to awaken in Simone the pain that was hers. She did not dare to ask questions about the death of their mother,” he says.

Reproduced in the exhibition, a letter from Denise dated December 14, 1987 bears witness to this.

“I always thought that in your flesh and in your soul your sufferings were incomparable with mine,” she wrote to Simone. “We each tried to survive as best we could,” she also said in this missive which she ultimately never sent.

© 2026 AFP

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