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François and Berthe Bousson owned a grocery store in Boissy Saint-Léger, in metropolitan Paris. In 1938, Hillel and Nacha Rutkowsky, a Jewish couple from Paris, put their son Jacques into the couple’s care. Nacha was convalescing from tuberculosis and would visit her son every Tuesday.
In 1941, Hillel Rutkowsky was arrested and imprisoned in Drancy. He remained in detention until his deportation to the east in June 1942. His wife Nacha was arrested in the great Vel d’Hiv roundup of the Paris Jews on 16 July 1942, and was sent to the east two weeks later. Before being deported, she managed to smuggle a letter from Drancy to the Boussons, asking them to treat her son as their own. The Boussons honored the request fully. They took good care of Jacques for the remainder of the war, and after liberation returned the boy whose parents had perished to relatives in Lyons.
On August 27, 1996, Yad Vashem recognized François and Berthe Bousson as Righteous Among the Nations.
