Filmmaker Loridan-Ivens, Auschwitz companion of Simone Veil, dies at 90

PARIS, France — French writer and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a lifelong friend of Simone Veil after the pair met in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp, died Tuesday aged 90, the late French minister’s son Jean Veil told AFP.

“She was mother’s deportation comrade,” said Jean Veil, who was also the Loridan-Ivens’ family lawyer.

Loridan-Ivens was taken to the Nazi camp when she was just 15.

“That terribly difficult episode of their lives made them unwavering friends” with a relationship which was “almost family,” he added.

This file photo taken on January 27, 2005 at Auschwitz-Birkenau shows French President Jacques Chirac (L) and former Auschwitz prisoner and former French Health Minister Simone Veil, at the former Auschwitz Nazi death camp, before ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than one million people died (AFP PHOTO / PATRICK KOVARIK)

It was on May 10, 1945, three days after Germany officially surrendered to the Allies, that Loridan-Ivens saw her first Russian soldier, approaching the camp on a scooter waving a red flag.

She then spent the rest of her life denouncing injustice and violence.

French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux on Twitter described Loridan-Ivens as “a lesson in life, to ponder and perpetuate.”

Women’s rights icon and former health minister Simone Veil died last year aged 89.

Loridan-Ivens put her autobiographical reminisces on screen in her 2003 film “Birch-Tree Meadow”, the title a literal translation of “Birkenau.”

Her second husband, Dutch documentary filmmaker Henri Anton ‘Joris’ Ivens, died in 1989.