Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Pritchard, rescuer of Jews in Holocaust, dies
Then-young social work student rescued dozens
Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who was credited with saving dozens of Jews during the Holocaust, spiriting some to safe houses, hiding others under floorboards, and, in one case, executing a Nazi before he could arrest a family of four, died Dec. 11 in Washington. She was 96.
The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, according to her family.
Pritchard was recognized in 1981 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as one of the “righteous among the nations” - those gentiles who, seeking no reward, risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet that claimed 6 million lives during World War II.
She was said to have fed, clothed, hidden or otherwise aided as many as 150 people, many of them children. She insisted that she could not have done her work without the assistance, overt or implied, of neighbors, friends and other members of the resistance. She observed, her son Arnold Pritchard recalled, that only rarely if ever during the Holocaust could one person single-handedly save the life of another.
Pritchard — then van Binsbergen — was 19 when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She credited her father, a Dutch judge who abhorred the Nazi ideology, and her mother, an Englishwoman who raised her daughter in the Anglican faith, with instilling in her a sense of justice and moral resolve.
The “crucial moment” for her came in 1942, she said, when she was riding her bicycle to her university in Amsterdam and witnessed the liquidation of a home for Jewish children. Deportation of Jews from the Netherlands began that year and would continue into 1944. Of 107,000 Jews taken away, all but 5,200 would perish. Less than 25 percent of Dutch Jewry survived the Holocaust, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“It was a beautiful spring morning, and it was a street I had known since I had been born, and all of a sudden you see little kids picked up by their pigtails or by a leg and thrown over the side of a truck,” Pritchard said in an interview published in the volume “Voices From the Holocaust” by Harry James Cargas. “You stop but you can’t believe it.”
She watched two women attempt to stop the soldiers, only to be put in the truck with the children. At that moment, she said, she committed herself to fighting Nazi persecution.
With about 10 friends, she helped obtain false identity documents and hiding places to help Jews evade arrest. Despite food shortages, they scrounged up extra ration cards and provisions. She put her social work training to use by finding host families to take in Jewish children.
At times, she performed what was known as the “mission of disgrace,” falsely declaring herself to be the unwed mother of a baby to conceal the child’s Jewish identity.
For nearly three years, Pritchard cared for a Jewish man, Fred Polak, and his two young sons and infant daughter, taking up residence in the country home of an acquaintance where they were hidden. In case of a Nazi roundup, they perfected a routine by which the father and his children could slip beneath the floorboards within 17 seconds.
One day, three Germans and a Dutch policeman came to search the house and left, having failed to detect the hideaway. Shortly thereafter, the Dutchman, who suspected that something was awry, returned and discovered the hide-out. Before he could make an arrest, Pritchard grabbed a small revolver and fatally shot him.
Michele Morgan, a French movie actress who starred in the moody masterpiece “Port of Shadows” and who, during a brief Hollywood sojourn, helped introduce Frank Sinatra to film audiences in his first big role, died Tuesday. She was 96.
French President François Hollande announced the death, calling her “an elegance, a grace, a legend that left a mark on many generations… . The greatest directors called upon her, and she was part of masterpieces that still live in everyone’s memories.”
In a career spanning seven decades, Morgan was best known as the ethereal femme fatale in “Port of Shadows” (1938), a film at the core of the poetic realism movement in French cinema.
As visually sumptuous as they were bleak, the movies often involved working-class characters and social outcasts whose destinies are beyond their control, in essence a precursor to the cynical and sinister world of American film noir.
“Port of Shadows” featured Jean Gabin, the biggest star in France, as an army deserter on the lam in a seedy port of call. He enjoys a passionate interlude with a 17-year-old waif sporting a beret and transparent raincoat (Morgan) before she ultimately seals his doom through her association with two unsavory underworld figures.
After a further series of dark-lady roles, several opposite her lover Gabin, she spent World War II making movies in the United States. She was stuck in propaganda and espionage fare for RKO Studios, including “Joan of Paris” (1942) with Paul Henreid and “Passage to Marseille” (1944) opposite Humphrey Bogart.
She was a leading contender for the Ingrid Bergman role in “Casablanca” (1942), but RKO demanded a huge loan-out fee that the rival Warner Bros. would not meet. Instead she appeared in “Higher and Higher” (1943), a musical with Sinatra in which she played a maid impersonating a debutante.
“Why look back?” she told the New York Times a few years later. “I was so young then, so miserable with my poor attempts at English. I used to say ‘crying trees’ for weeping willows. You didn’t mow the lawn. No, you shaved it. And those pictures. Those stinkers.”
By war’s end, she returned to France and reignited her career with “Pastoral Symphony” (1946), based on a story by the future Nobel laureate Andre Gide. Morgan won the best actress award at the Cannes film festival for her portrayal of an orphaned blind girl in love with a married Swiss pastor who also draws the attention of his son.
Simone Renée Roussel was born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-surSeine on Feb. 29, 1920. She became an overnight sensation as a young girl accused of a crime of passion in Allegret’s “Gribouille” (1937) opposite the star, Raimu. She was then raced into “Storm” (1938) as the young woman having a tryst with a businessman played by Charles Boyer.