Maurice ZEITOUN

Maurice ZEITOUN (1898 – 1944)

Maurice Zeitoun was born in Cairo on January 23, 1898. He was the eldest of seven boys, one of whom was my father Édouard, who became a veterinarian.

Maurice shared a student room in 1912 and 1913 with Elian Finbert, a wildlife writer who in 1936 created the collection « Scènes de la vie des bêtes » for the publisher Albin Michel.

Elian was a francophone man of letters of Jewish origin, born in 1899 in Jaffa, at that time in Palestine.

The Zeitoun and Finbert families were already connected, as they were neighbors in Tantah, Egypt, where my father Édouard was born.

Maurice studied medicine, and then in 1936 he obtained a position in Egypt as chief editor of the medical journal Revue Pratique des Maladies des Pays chauds (Journal of Applied Medicine for Tropical  Diseases).

Maurice arrived in France before the war. During the German invasion he took shelter from the air raid alerts in Elian’s cellar on the boulevard Murat in Paris. Elian advised him to leave Paris in May, 1940. He himself, quite ill, left fot the Free Zone with the Sequana Publishing house (Julliard) for which he worked, at the beginning of June 1940.

He urged Maurice to join him in the Free Zone at Céret.

But Maurice remained and worked in Puteaux for a cosmetics laboratory, the Zizine Laboratory.

His friend, Doctor Tagger, relates Maurice’s resistance activity, notably the distribution of fake I.D. cards and fake medical certificates allowing young men to avoid compulsory work service in Germany.

Maurice was picked up in a roundup at the St-Lazare train station and taken away by the Gestapo as an Egyptian, and thus British citizen. He was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz  in one of the last convoys, n° 77, on July 31, 1944.

He may have been killed soon after his arrival on August 5, 1944.

Daniel Urbejtel, a survivor of that convoy who dit not know him, has no recollection of having seen him.

 

Christian Zeitoun, the son of Maurice’s brother Édouard