Sigismond Hirsch

Origins and early life

Sigismond Hirsch was born at Sighișoara in Transylvania on 22 January 1906 and died at Massy on his eighty-fourth birthday, 22 January 1990. A French Jewish physician, a radiologist with a Paris doctorate of 1933, he was in 1926 one of the founders, with Robert Gamzon, of the Éclaireurs israélites de France, the Jewish scout movement that would become one of the principal instruments of Jewish rescue under the Occupation.

Work and career

In the war he commanded a resistance sector as a captain of the Forces françaises de l'intérieur, while his household sheltered and moved Jewish children. He and his wife Berthe were arrested and deported by convoy 62, which left Drancy on 20 November 1943 for Auschwitz. Berthe was murdered at Birkenau; he survived, and came back. In 1945 he founded the COSEM, a network of medical centres built on the principle that everyone should be able to be treated, whatever their means — a doctor who had seen medicine used to sort the living from the dead deciding what medicine was for.

He was made a grand officer of the Legion of Honour in 1984 and held the Croix de guerre. His son Jean-Raphaël Hirsch, a liaison agent at ten years old, became a surgeon.