Bronchart Léon

Bronchard, Léon File 6354 From the end of WWI, Léon Bronchard, a Frenchman born in 1896, worked as a locomotive engineer. In June 1940, when France signed an armistice with Germany, Bronchard was living in Brive-la-Gaillarde, a town in the département of Corrèze in the Vichy-controlled zone. For both ideological and humanitarian reasons, Bronchard was against the policies of the Vichy regime. In November 1942, when the Germans took over France, Bronchard’s neighbors were the Rosenberg family, Polish Jews who had emigrated to Paris in 1920. Three of their four children were born in France. Despite their lengthy residence in France, the Rosenbergs had not acquired French citizenship. They had fled from Paris to Brive. Rosenberg and his oldest son, aged twenty, joined the Resistance and left Mme Rosenberg and her three daughters in Brive. Bronchard saved their lives by providing forged identity cards so convincing that the Rosenbergs’ seventeen-year-old daughter, Paulette, was able to work as a courier for the Resistance, carrying documents and information. Léon Bronchard also helped save Adolphe Strykowsky, a Polish-born Jewish friend of the Rosenbergs who was hunted by the Gestapo. Bronchard lent Strykowsky a railway uniform, and they went to the train station together. Bronchard took out a parked train and started moving. He picked up Strykowsky about three kilometers from the station and took him to Grenoble, which was then under Italian occupation. Léon Bronchard’s courage was his undoing. On October 31, 1942 (only a few days before the Germans entered the south of France), Bronchard refused to take a train with Jewish deportees from nearby Montauban to Germany, and about two months later, he refused to take a trainload of German soldiers. He was arrested and deported to a concentration camp along with his oldest son Louis, aged twenty. To the best of our knowledge, Léon Bronchard was the only railway worker in all of France who dared refuse to transportJewish deportees. Louis Bronchard survived and returned to France after the war. On October 17, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Léon Bronchard as Righteous Among the Nations.