Leon Schwartzenberg

Short Biography

Leon Schwartzenberg was born in Paris, but, being Jewish, in 1942 he and his family fled to Toulouse to avoid the Nazi occupation. Despite this escape to freedom, his medical studies were halted by L`Ordre des Medecins on account of his race. He joined the Resistance, helping to smuggle allied airmen from France to Spain. After the war he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and resumed his studies in Paris, specialising in oncology and working at the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris and later the Gustave-Roussy Institute in Villejuif.Leon Schwartzenberg became a leading French cancer specialist. But he was more widely known as a radical intellectual and servant of social justice. For a few days in 1988 he was briefly a government minister. Thereafter he became increasingly outspoken, the champion of a range of issues—drug taking, the welfare of homeless people, and the right to die. He also served as a vociferous and occasionally unpredictable Socialist member of the European Parliament.He protested with the poor and dispossessed, taking to the streets with striking nurses and joining the "sans papiers" (illegal immigrants) when they occupied the Church of St Bernard in Paris in 1996. He was in favour of providing syringes to drug users and of testing pregnant women for HIV. Twice he was thrown out of the medical union L`Ordre des Medecins, but he was unrepentant. Nevertheless, Schwartzenberg, who lost two brothers in Mauthausen concentration camp during the second world war, had some respectability in the eyes of the establishment. He had been the surgeon to whom the French government turned in 1990 when Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief known as the "butcher of Lyons, " was suspected of having leukaemia. The author of several books on health, Schwartzenberg devoted himself in later years to causes that included opposition to genetically modified foods and the plight of illegal immigrants.Leon met Marina Vladi in 1981. He was introduced by his patient Andrei Tarkovski, friend of Marina`s late husband Vladimir Vysotzki. The friendship grew into love. Leon divorced to marry Marina. This marriage was the longest for the actress.By a quirk of fate Leon Schwartzenberg, cancer specialist , died from cancer in Paris on 14 October 2003.