Denise Vernay

The remains of her sister, Simone Veil, who was also interred at Montparnasse following her death in 2017, were exhumed and reinterred on 1 July 2018 in the Panthéon after thousands of French citizens petitioned their government to recognize her service to the nation with reburial there (only the fifth woman in history to be accorded this honor).

Just over two years later, her husband, Alain Vernay, died at home at the age of 97 on 12 August 2015 and was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. His obituary in Le Figaro noted that the happiest years of his life were those spent with his wife. They were survived by three children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Vernay-Jacob went on to live a long, full life. She died at the age of 88 in Paris, France, on 4 March 2013.

In 2007, she and her sister were photographed together at a World War II commemoration event in Nice. The next year, Vernay-Jacob strongly criticized the film, Les Femmes de l’Ombre (Women of the Shadows), for its portrayal of female members of the French Resistance. "This film is worse than if they had done nothing," she told a reporter from The Sunday Telegraph. "I am very sorry that it was made at all, especially at a time when those generations watching it who did not know the war can no longer differentiate between the reality of our commitment and these ridiculous women portrayed in the film. Women joined the Resistance out of patriotism, a conviction which appears nowhere in this film." Adding that it was a "betrayal of their memory to say they were recruited by blackmail, lies and pardons," she noted, "Such recruitment, carried out in haste, is implausible, even impossible."

Meanwhile, her younger sister, Simone Veil, opted for a far more public life, becoming France's Minister of Health from 1974 to 1979 under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of the European Parliament and member of the Constitutional Council of France. In 1973 and 1975, she played key roles in France's legalization of contraception and abortion.

Her happiness was short-lived, however. In 1952, she lost her second "mother" when Madeleine was killed in a car accident.

After the war, Denise Jacob's eldest sister, Madeleine, became a source of comfort and stability as she assumed the position of matriarch of the surviving Jacob sisters, all three of whom soon married. In 1947, Denise wed Alain Vernay (born Alain Weill) (1918-2015), who went on to become a leader in the field of economic journalism after being hired by the French newspaper Le Figaro in 1969.

Testifying in 1946 about her war-time experiences, she noted that her departure had been prompted by a wave of arrests of United Resistance Movement members. In an attempt to mask her appearance to facilitate her escape, she exchanged coats with one of her comrades, but preserved her sense of self by refusing to cut off her blonde braids.

On 23 August 1946, Denise Jacob testified about her experiences. Roughly translated from the original French, she said:

Despite this brutal treatment, she did not break, and never revealed the names of her Resistance associates. Her former supervisor, Georges Guidollet-Ostier, was so confident about her ability to withstand whatever her tormentors did to her that he declined to change his alias or address. Deported to Mauthausen with 2,000 other women under the secretive Nacht und Nebel ("night and fog") program, she was targeted for extermination. Before the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) could carry out her execution, however, she and other members of her group were saved by International Red Cross delegates who pressured camp personnel to free the women. Transported from the camp in white Red Cross trucks on 21 April 1945, they were taken to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where they were housed briefly before being moved to Haute-Savoie via Geneva and Annemasse.

Her sisters, Madeleine and Simone, who had been imprisoned initially with their mother at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Occupied Poland, had been separated from her when she was transferred to the Nazi's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she died from typhus on 15 March 1945, just prior to that camp's liberation. Their father and brother, who had been deported to Lithuania by convoy number 73, were never found.

Inspired by the Allied landing on 6 June 1944, she chose, on 14 June, to serve as "an agent liaison for the Secret Army, which held the Glières Plateau with the F.T.P. (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans)".

During autumn 1943, Denise, now 19 years old, was encouraged to become a full-fledged member of the French Resistance by joining one of its cells in Lyon. Adopting her old scouting nickname, she entered the underground movement as "Miarka", received training, and then began clandestinely transporting resistance messages by bicycle. After seven months of this work, she was urged to leave Lyon for safety reasons.

In 1941, Denise Jacob performed her first acts of resistance, distributing anti-fascist educational materials and listening to BBC Radio for news of the war, an activity which had been outlawed by the Vichy Government. The 17-year-old high school student then relayed that news to her teachers and classmates by posting it on blackboards at her school. While she was away at a cheerleading camp in September 1943, she received word from her family that it was too dangerous for her to return home to Nice, so she moved to a friend's home in Isère.

The Fall of France in the summer of 1940 led to the arrival of the Gestapo in Nice on September 9 and the enactment that autumn of the law on the status of Jews by the French Vichy Government. These events made daily life even more precarious for the Jacob family. The October 1940 Statut prepared by Raphaël Alibert "embraced the definition of a Jew established in the Nuremberg Laws", and deprived Jewish people of their civil rights, including the right to work. As a result, Andrè Jacob lost his job. Sixteen-year-old Denise became a mathematics tutor to help support her family. She also became more involved in the Girl Scouts, a source of freedom and hope for her – as well as the source of her nickname, "Miarka," the pseudonym she would initially use as a courier for the French Resistance.

The family's financial situation changed, however, as the Great Depression took hold across France in 1931. By 1932, their parents made the decision to exchange the family's villa for an apartment in Nice.

Denise Vernay-Jacob (21 June 1924 – 4 March 2013) was a member of the French Resistance during World War II, who operated under the aliases of "Miarka" and "Annie" from 1941. She narrowly avoided the March 1944 roundup of Jews in Nice, France which resulted in the deportation of her parents to Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. Captured less than three months later, she survived torture by the Gestapo and imprisonment at two Nazi concentration camps – Ravensbrück and Mauthausen. She was rescued by the Red Cross in April 1945 and returned home to France at the conclusion of the war.

Born in Paris, France, on 21 June 1924 as Denise Jacob, she was a daughter of French Jewish architect André Jacob and his wife, Yvonne Jacob (née Steinmetz), who had given up her chemistry studies to begin her family. The second of four children, she moved with her parents and sister, Madeleine (born in 1922 and also known as "Snowy"), to Nice later in 1924 after her father received a promising business offer. Her younger brother, Jean, and sister, Simone Annie Liline, were born in 1925 and on 13 July 1927, respectively.