Remembrance "Little Boxes of Ashes"

By SIMONE VEIL

President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, Veil, now 62, was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944, where most of her family perished.

I was scared all the time. I was always aware that, after all, we could lose this war. As Jews, we felt more threatened. With the Anschluss, girls at our school who were refugees told of humiliation, of Jews being forced to scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes in Vienna. When some told of receiving little boxes of ashes from Dachau, we had great difficulty believing that people were actually being killed. Nobody imagined that there could be a plan for extermination.