At 99, Dr. Simon Pierre Zeitlin could look back on two lives full of risk and adventure.
There was the one he had as a physician who opened a South Side practice and later headed the Bexar County Medical Society.
And before that, there was his life at war as a French army captain,
held prisoner by the Nazis until escaping, and crossing the Pyrenees
from Spain to France.
He talked some about that, but not a lot.
“I know he was captured,” said his daughter, Paulette Mallard. “I know he was in the French Foreign Legion in North Africa making his way back to France and I think ... he was captured in Spain.”
Zeitlin had lived in San Antonio for more than 60 years when he died Aug. 28.
He was born on a train in Latvia to French parents, Bernard Pierre and Rachel Zeitlin, and grew up in Charleville, Alsace-Lorraine.
He studied medicine at the University of Paris and joined the French army's medical corps after the war broke out.
Taken captive by German troops, he was relocated to a prisoner-of-war camp in Spain.
Zeitlin, a captain, broke out and crossed the Pyrenees on foot until
he made it to France. Details, however, are sketchy. He didn't talk a
lot about the war, but talked of it in a newspaper story in 1946.
“‘He constantly emphasized the systematic starvation rations handed
out but was restrained in his descriptions, due, he said, to the fact
that many things he had seen and experienced were too obnoxious to ask
civilized people to listen to,'” Mallard said, reading from the
newspaper story.