81 years ago this week, a 16-year-old girl in Nice, France passed her final school exam and the next day, the Gestapo came. 🕯️
Her name was Simone Jacob.
The world would later know her as Simone Veil.
Born on July 13, 1927, in Nice, France, Simone grew up in a secular Jewish family that believed passionately in the French values of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Her father was an architect. Her mother was a trained chemist who gave up her career to raise four children. They were French first, Jewish second - patriots who believed their country would protect them.
They were wrong.
In March 1944, sixteen-year-old Simone sat her baccalauréat - her final school examination - using her real name. It was a small act of courage and normalcy in a city already suffocating under Nazi occupation. Her family had false identity papers. Her mother had begged her not to use her real name.
She passed the exam.
The next day, walking through the streets of Nice to celebrate with her classmates, she was stopped by two German officers in plain clothes. They checked her papers. They saw through the falsification.
She was arrested on the spot.
Within hours, the Gestapo had found her entire family.
Simone, her mother, and her sisters were sent first to the transit camp at Drancy - then loaded onto Convoy 71, bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. They arrived on April 15, 1944, after two and a half days locked in overcrowded, airless cattle cars.
Simone was sixteen years old.
She was given prisoner number 78651.
At Auschwitz, Simone and her sisters survived through sheer will - supporting each other through forced labor, starvation, and cold so brutal it felt deliberate. Because it was. Her mother shielded them as much as she could, whispering courage into them in the dark.
Her father and brother, deported separately, were never seen again.
In early 1945 the three sisters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Their mother - weakened to nothing - died of typhus just weeks before the camp was liberated.
She had kept her daughters alive long enough to see them survive.
Then she was gone.
Simone returned to France in May 1945. She was seventeen years old. She had no parents. She had no home. She had a number tattooed on her arm and a grief so vast it had no edges.
She could have disappeared into it.
Instead she went to university.
She studied law. She became a magistrate. She fought for prison reform and the dignity of detainees. In 1974, she was appointed France's Minister of Health and stood alone in a parliament full of hostile men to argue for a law legalizing abortion - enduring hours of mockery and hatred and won.
The law is still called the Veil Law today.
In 1979 she became the first woman elected President of the European Parliament.
In 2008 she was voted into the Académie Française - only the sixth woman in its history.
In 2018, France buried her in the Panthéon - among the greatest heroes the nation has ever produced.
When asked once how she carried everything she had survived, Simone Veil said simply:
"I never forgot. But I chose to build."
She died on June 30, 2017, aged 89.
The girl who walked out of Auschwitz with nothing but her name and gave the world everything. 🕯️
Hidden History
On November 30, 1944, Ángel Sanz Briz, the Spanish consul-general in Budapest, quietly left Hungary on orders from Madrid. He left a note telling Giorgio Perlasca he could escape to Switzerland via the Spanish embassy in Vienna.
Perlasca didn’t leave.
He stood alone in the empty embassy, surrounded by safe houses full of Jews protected by the Spanish flag. Without a consul, he knew the protection would collapse and the people inside would be deported.
So he made a bold decision. On embassy letterhead, he declared that Sanz Briz was on temporary leave and that he — Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman and former fascist — had been appointed chargé d’affaires.
He signed it, walked into the Hungarian government offices, and handed it over.
They believed him.
Perlasca had once believed in fascism. Born in Italy in 1910, he had fought for Mussolini in East Africa and for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. But in 1938, when Mussolini introduced racial laws against Italian Jews, something broke in him. He became fiercely anti-Nazi.
In 1944, trapped in Budapest after Italy’s surrender, he had sought protection at the Spanish embassy. Sanz Briz gave him a Spanish passport and the name Jorge. Perlasca immediately began helping issue protection papers and maintain safe houses.
After the ambassador’s departure, Perlasca ran the embassy alone for 45 days — from December 1, 1944, to January 16, 1945. Using a long-cancelled 1924 Spanish law, he issued forged protection documents to thousands of Jews, regardless of their origin.
He kept eight safe houses flying the Spanish flag, bought food on the black market with his own money when funds ran out, and repeatedly risked his life at deportation sites. Working alongside Raoul Wallenberg, he bluffed and argued to pull Jews off trains — even facing down Adolf Eichmann on one occasion.
When the Arrow Cross and SS planned to burn the Budapest Ghetto with its 60,000 Jews inside, Perlasca confronted the Hungarian interior minister. He threatened diplomatic and financial retaliation from Spain and offered to help the minister’s family escape the Soviets. The plan was cancelled.
The ghetto’s inhabitants survived.
After the war, Perlasca returned to Italy, married, and raised a family. For 42 years he told no one what he had done — not even his wife and children.
In 1987, the people he had saved finally found him through a newspaper advertisement. His family learned the truth the same way.
He saved 5,218 people — more than Oskar Schindler. In 1989, Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations.
When asked why, he simply said: “I couldn’t stand seeing people branded like animals. I couldn’t stand seeing children being killed. I did what I had to do.”
Fat Caligula vowed repeatedly he would 100% end the Russia/Ukraine war within 24 hours. His laughable response to his own bullshit claims: ‘I was being a little bit sarcastic.’ Trump is so fucking full of shit he could fertilize every golf course he cheats on.
🚨NEW: "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" just dropped its first response to ABC, FCC chair, and Disney firing Jimmy Kimmel.
Trump ain't sleeping tonight. 🤣
This is a must-watch. 🔥
Trigger Warning - Suicide
One in four of us has experienced suicidal thoughts. Starting a conversation can make all the difference 💬
As part of the @PremierLeague's initiative #TogetherAgainstSuicide, Declan Rice discusses the importance of speaking to friends and loved ones about your mental health 🧠
Outrageous. Trump has told the UK that if we want tariff relief we need to buy chlorinated chicken from the US! 🤢🐔 How dare he try and impose poor food standards in Britain. Sign the petition to keep chlorine-washed chicken off our shelves: https://t.co/2cUWvkHNCF
Thank you @SpursOfficial fans for standing up for Emily again today.
5000 yellow balloons, singing "she's one of our own", and featuring her on the screen at halftime. What an amazing fan base.
456 days. Emily we will never stop fighting for you 🎗
“This is beginning to really f*** me off."
@Feargal_Sharkey is back testing rivers for toxins, and he’s far from impressed by what he’s found in the River Wylye.
Andy Cohen, Debra Messing, @PatriciaHeaton and a host of celebrities join forces to speak up for the 13 women held captive in Gaza.
“13 women are being held captive by H*mas terrorists in Gaza. These are their names and their stories.” @andy
🎥 @bringhomenow
This is an incredible piece of work by @JonathanPieNews.
From the research, to the sequencing, to the performance.
You want to know why so many people are turning away from vapid MSM and looking to political comedy & alternative news? Look no further. 👇