Voices of the Holocaust: Simone Veil
In the context of the parallel actions for the 23rd Greek French Film Festival, on the occasion of the premiere of the film Simone: The Voyage of the Century and the 80th anniversary of the mass deportation of Greek Jews to the extermination camps, the French Institute of Greece commissioned the director Yolanda Markopoulou to create a special installation to highlight a unique document: the long-hour testimony of Simone Veil , the first president of the European Parliament and defender of women's rights in France.
In her calm and almost clinical way, Simone Veil gave an interview-documentary to the French audio-visual archive INA. She describes her life as a teenager in Nice, the beginning of the war, the arrest and deportation of herself and her family, the hell of Auschwitz where she loses her mother. She tells us about her liberation from the camps but also her difficult return to France, to a new "normality" after her traumatic experiences.
The interview was first published in autumn 2022, and is presented fully subtitled in Greek , with the support of the delegation of the European Parliament in Greece.
Installation executive production: Polyplanity Productions – Vicky Strataki & Nikos Charalampidis
Warm thanks to INA, the French Institute of Greece and Thodoris Koutsautis, the Office of the European Parliament of Greece and Haris Kountouros, the Jewish Museum of Greece and Janet Battinou, the Thessaloniki International Festival and Yannis Fourkiotis and Maria Polyviou and the Cinema Museum of Thessaloniki.
