Simone Veil and I were born just a few months apart, in the late 1920s. Both teenagers during the war, we shared the same sensibility and convictions even though we didn’t belong to the same political family. But even more than I admire the politician, I admire the woman. I lost my father in the concentration camp of Sobibór but what she had to live through was much crueller. As I contemplate my own mortality, my esteem for her only grows.

Simone was 16 when she and her family were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. In January 1945, on the death march from the camp, her mother died in her arms. As for her father and brother, transferred to another camp, they never returned.

Had she run for the French presidency there's no doubt in my mind that she would have won

And yet, with her indomitable youth and determination, she became a champion of reconciliation with Germany. Instead of looking back, she looked ahead: the future for the next generations and hope of a lasting peace could lie only in a European Union, with a reconciled France and Germany at its heart. It required true moral greatness to have felt this way just months after returning from the death camps.

That is how I see her: as a woman who managed the incredible achievement of transcending her own immense personal suffering in the higher interest of her country and of her children’s future. Against all the odds, she turned her back on despair and chose hope.

Simone’s passion for the European project was as considerable as it was sincere. It reminds me of Victor Hugo’s, who dreamed of the United States of Europe after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and whose writings about it still feel revolutionary today. Victor Hugo too suffered terrible personal tragedies, the loss of his children to accident and madness, also the early deaths of his wife and mistress. Both Victor Hugo and Simone Veil had a qualité d’âme, as we say in French, in other words a nobility of the soul, that is very rare.

For me and my compatriots, Simone soon became a symbol, and there is nothing more powerful than a symbol. Had she run for the French presidency, there is little doubt in my mind that she would have won her party’s backing and gone on to be elected. However, I don’t think she wanted to; she was too devoted to her family.

Still, she remained until her death the French Republic incarnate, and the symbol of the unremittable will to live. I would add, on a personal level, too, that she was virtue incarnate. Her 67-year marriage to Antoine, who died in 2013, provided her strength and joy throughout her life.

Simone and I often discussed the Jewish condition, and what struck me was how, in the interests of the nation, she wanted to turn the page on the dark hours of the Nazi occupation. For instance, when [the Nazi “butcher of Lyons”] Klaus Barbie was brought to trial in France in the late 1980s, I was justice minister then, she disapproved of it. I was astounded but her main concern was the interest of the nation: she wasn’t in favour of stirring up the pain of the past; she always looked towards the future. For her, Vichy and the collaboration wasn’t France.

When she led the fight to legalise abortion in 1974, she was still a novice in politics. Parliamentary battles were very tough, but she battled on, with great courage, in the face of vicious attacks by her own political family, the right. It was cunning of president Giscard [d’Estaing], and the sign that he was a true moderniser, to choose her to lead this fight: she was a deeply devoted mother and wife, and a Holocaust survivor. It is important to say that she was not a militant; she was the defender of a cause that was just. A great humanist. Just like Victor Hugo and Emile Zola whom she will join in her last resting place in France’s Panthéon.