(transcript of video presented at the Press Conference November 22, 2004)

At Yad Vashem, I filled Pages of Testimony in memory of my mother, my father and my brother.

Today, November 22, for the first time, this database is accessible to everybody and this is really wonderful, marvelous, since people will certainly be able to find relatives who have disappeared, whom they have not heard any more about; and also, mostly, the memory of these millions of assassinated Jews, will be thus immortalized. And I assert that although my parents have never been in Israel, thanks to Yad Vashem, their memory will surely remain alive there for hundreds of years.

1.This has been filled by your grandmother in December 1973. You can see that your great-grand-father’s surname was Jacob, his first name was André; that the name of his mother – that means your great-great-grand-mother - was Mathilde; that his residence during the war, was in Nice; and if you look at the box “place and date of death”, you can se that he has been sent from Drancy, which was the transit camp, near Paris, at the end of April 1944, to an “unknown” destination.

2. This was your grandmother’s brother.

Here is his file.

That means that in 1944, he was not 20 years old, yet.

-We know the day he was deported, and since then: nothing …

3-When she married her husband; her maiden name was Steinmetz spouse Jacob, since she was married with André Jacob. March ‘44, it was near the end of the war in Europe and the soviet army liberated Poland …

We were in Auschwitz…She was still alive, since we had been deported and we stayed together, Mum, my older sister, Madeleine, and I.  First, we had to walk for 70 to 80 km, to a camp called Gleiwitz, and from there, we were taken in open trucks and they brought us to Bergen-Belsen. And in Bergen-Belsen, there was a terrible epidemic of typhus, and Mum who had been very much weakened by Auschwitz, caught typhus, she died of typhus

…This is a way of keeping their memory, knowing that there are many families who have disappeared completely. And above all, Yad Vashem does a fantastic work, in such conditions, for future generations. This is extremely important for the families, this is extremely important for the historians. I would also say that this is quite essential to fight against those who might be tempted to negate the veracity of Shoah's existence, importance, and even the number of the victims. From the moment they have been identified so precisely, with photographs, with such indications, lying is obviously impossible…

Mrs. Simone Veil is the former President of the European Parliament, former Minister in French government, and current President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, France