Dutch heroine of Holocaust dies at 96
Social work student credited with helping up to 150 Jews after Nazi occupation
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.
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 singlehandedly save the life of another.
Pritchard - then van Binsbergen was 19 when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940.
The “crucial moment” for her came in 1942, she said, when she was riding her bicycle in Amsterdam and witnessed the liquidation of a home for Jewish children. 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 in whatever way possible.
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. They gave the baby sleeping pills to prevent her from crying.
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 nonetheless suspected that something was awry, returned and discovered the hideout. Before he could make an arrest, Pritchard grabbed a small revolver that she had kept for such an emergency and fatally shot him.
“I would do it again, under the same circumstances,” she told an interviewer years later, “but it still bothers me.”
After the war, Pritchard became a United Nations social worker in displaced-persons camps. Through those assignments, she met her husband, Anton Pritchard, a former U.S. Army officer. In 1947, they were married in one of the camps.
The Pritchards settled in Waccabuc, N.Y., and later in Vershire, Vt. Pritchard continued her social service work in the United States, helping refugee families. She graduated from what is now the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and ran a psychoanalysis practice for several decades. In 2006, she moved to Washington.
Her husband died in 1991. Survivors include three sons, eight grandchildren and a great-grandson.
Pritchard’s wartime story was chronicled in books including “Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust” by Eva Fogelman and the documentary “The Courage to Care” (1985).
“Most of us were brought up to tell [the] truth, to obey the secular law and the Ten Commandments,” she said in a 1996 lecture. “By 1945, I had stolen, cheated, deceived, and even killed.”
She attributed her morals to her parents, who she said had treated her with “respect and consideration from the time” she was born. “As a result,” she observed, “I grew up treating other people the same way.”