PARIS (EJP)---Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil, 82, who became a French minister and the first president of the European Parliament is to become Thursday the sixth woman to enter the prestigious Academie Francaise.

This body oversees French language and usage.

The ceremony, to be broadcast live by France 3 television,  will be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozyn and his predecessor, Jacques Chirac.

A lawyer by profession, Simone Veil legalized abortion in France - her hardest political fight- when she was Minister of health in 1975 under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

She is considered as one of the most popular women in France.

Veil was born Simone Annie Liline Jacob, the daughter of a Jewish architect in Niced, southern France.In 1944, the Veil family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen.

Simone, her mother, died shortly before the camp's liberation in 1945. Veil's father and brother also died in internment. Veil's other sister who had been arrested as a member of the Resistance survived her imprisonment in the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Veil returned to speak at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005 in the framework of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps.

She is the honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.