Laura (Loly) Francken

William Francken (January 4, 1889 - September 3, 1962) was a Swiss physician who has been honored with the title of Righteous Among the Nations (1997).

Son of a doctor, born onJanuary 4, 1899 in Rotterdam, Willem (his birth name) Francken spent his childhood in Menton, then studied medicine in Lausanne, before coming to settle in Begnins, in 1914. Naturalized Swiss, he married Laure (known as Loly) Fiaux, who was the first woman to obtain an engineering degree in French-speaking Switzerland. A pioneer in the fight against tuberculosis, they founded the "Pavillon de La Côte" in Gilly, the first sanatorium in the canton of Vaud.

In 1936, the couple adopted two brothers of French origin, Paul and Jean Lapierre.

Laure Francken owned a small holiday chalet, "Le Clou", above the small village of Novel, a veritable balcony above Lake Geneva and Saint-Gingolph, in the Haute-Savoie Alps at an altitude of 960 m.

Despite the formal ban on housing Jews, the Francken* couple not only did not close the door of their chalet to them, but, with the help of Germaine Brouze and Ernest Brouze, often provided them with room and board. The chalet was transformed into a dispensary and a refuge.

In September 1942, the Vaudois chalet, Le Clou, became a stopover for many fugitives.

Wim and Loly, with the complicity of Germaine Brouze and her cousin Ernest Brouze, neighbors and caretakers of the Francke house, resistance fighters and smugglers, helped men, women and children to cross the border by Haut de la Morge to reach Switzerland, less than a kilometer from the village.