The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Marion Pritchard, who risked her life to rescue Jews, dies at 96
MARION PRITCHARD, a gentile whose shock at watching Nazi soldiers storm a home for Jewish children in Amsterdam and load them into a truck for deportation inspired her to enter a clandestine world of rescuing Jews, died December 11 at her home in Washington. She was 96.
The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, her family said.
“By 1945, I had lied, stolen, cheated, deceived and even killed,” Pritchard said in a lecture in 1996 at the University of Michigan, where she received the Wallenberg Medal, a humanitarian award given by the university in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II.
In the spring of 1942, Pritchard was a social work student with a strong sense of outrage about the injustices perpetrated against the Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. One day, she recalled, as she was riding her bicycle to class, she saw Nazis at the children’s home “picking up the kids by an arm or a leg or by the hair” and throwing them into a truck.
“Well, I stopped my bike and looked,” she said in an oral history recorded in 1984 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. “Two other women coming down on the street got so furious, they attacked the German soldiers, and they just picked the women up and threw them in the truck after the kids. “I just stood there,” she added.
To save and shelter Jews, Pritchard registered Jewish infants as her own children and found safe, non-jewish homes for them. She helped feed Jews and get them ration cards.
She secured false identification papers to help them avoid capture by the Nazis, and found medical care for children through a friendly pediatrician.
Sometimes her role was simply to be one in a line of rescuers who handed Jewish children to someone else, who would then lead them out of danger. By her estimate, she helped rescue 150 Jews. Pritchard was recognised in 1981 by Yad Vashem, the world centre for Holocaust research and commemoration in Jerusalem, as Righteous Among the Nations, an honour given to gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. She was born Marion Philippina van Binsbergen on November 7, 1920, in Amsterdam, one of two children of Jacob and Grace van Binsbergen. Her mother, a homemaker, was born in Britain. Marion was educated in Amsterdam and England.
One night in 1941, she was studying with a friend in a house in Amsterdam when she was arrested by Nazis in a roundup of others there who had been covertly distributing mimeographed broadsheets culled from BBC news reports. She was not part of the group, she said, but was imprisoned for at least six months and tortured.
After the war, Pritchard worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in displaced-persons camps in Germany. That work enabled her to meet Anton Pritchard, a US Army officer who was the head of a camp in Bavaria. They were married in the camp. They moved to the United States in 1947, where Pritchard later became a psychoanalyst. She is survived by her sons, Arnold, Brian and Ivor; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Her husband, a health care consultant, died in 1991.