On television on Sunday October 9, in cinemas on October 12, in bookstores on October 13… Five years after her death, in June 2017, Simone Veil is making a comeback in the news in several ways.
Director Olivier Dahan has chosen to bring his life of struggles to the screen in Simone, the trip of the century, with Elsa Zylberstein. The actress explained that she had been preparing for the role for almost a year, learning how to “talk Simone” with professionals in the introduction to foreign languages. The particular intonation of this extraordinary woman has always fascinated another filmmaker, David Teboul. He signs Simone and her sisters, a collection of unpublished texts and photos never published presented in a double form: a documentary for France 5 (October 9) and a book for Les Arènes editions.
Enough to highlight the work of this fifties who crossed paths with Simone Veil for the first time one evening in 1979. At the time, he was 12 years old, he had just watched the series Holocaust to “Screen Folders” and he listens to this guest in an almond green ascot dress very calmly recalling her experience in a concentration camp where, she said then, “we had become real beasts”. “I was overwhelmed, he remembers. I come from a family of Sephardic Jews from Algeria and none of the women around me looked like Simone Veil. I watched the show until the end while I had class the next day. »
A long conversation
David Teboul grew obsessed with meeting Simone Veil, to listen to her again and again talk about Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was deported with her mother, Yvonne Jacob, and her sister Madeleine in April 1944.
He was 30 when he finally decided to call her, in 1997, to convince her to testify in front of a camera. She refuses, then ends up giving in to his insistence: “But what interests you? » “Your bun”he replies without thinking. “She told me about her hair at the camp, about the importance of not having been completely shaved when she arrived at Auschwitz. This is how my relationship with Simone Veil began. »
Their conversation lasts twenty years, until the death of the former deportee. Twenty years during which he recorded it at length, solely on his concentration camp experience: “The minister, Giscard d’Estaing, Chirac, I was absolutely not interested. I am convinced that when you have experienced Auschwitz, everything else is incidental. »
Later, David Teboul meets Denise Vernay, one of Simone Veil’s sisters, an active member of a resistance network, deported to Ravensbrück after being arrested in Lyon.
You have 51.75% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.