Simonne—A Passion for Life

A Holocaust survivor’s tale

The true story of a young girl who spent three years in the cellar of the Paris National Library during World War II.Paris, September 1944. Paris is free again. A kind-faced policeman carries an emaciated Jewish girl from a cellar. Her name is Simonne Levi, and for the past three years she has been held prisoner by police commissioner George Boucher. Raped. Abused. Never shown the light of day. She is fifteen years old.But that is only the beginning of Simonne Levi's story. Over the next sixty years she will marry four times, bear four children and adopt a fifth, travel to Tunisia, Italy, Switzerland, England, the United States, and Australia. She will meet Carl Jung, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali, battle the Swiss legal system and become a leader in the treatment of abused, handicapped, and autistic children. She will investigate lead poisoning in children and make powerful enemies, lose her house, her practice, and her livelihood. She will find redemption in the strangest of places, and in the end she will discover that for all she has been through she has no regrets, and life is beautiful.