3 Marion Pritchard
She shot a Nazi to save Jewish children
Like the angel of death, the Dutch police officer stood at the door. It was 2 o'clock in the morning, and he was hunting for Jews. Someone must have tipped him off to the three Jewish children sheltered in the home of Marion Pritchard. He entered the living room, his back to the bedroom where the youngsters were sleeping. Pritchard's gut told her he would send them to a concentration camp. Within two minutes, she'd decided what to do. She reached up to a shelf and felt for the revolver given to her for emergencies. "It was him or the kids, so I shot him," she says, unflinching. "It was a moment of excitement. I did it! I did it! The kids are safe! Then it was, what do I do with the body?"
During World War II, the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. But thousands of ordinary folks risked their own lives to help the intended victims. Marion Pritchard was one of the rescuers, concealing a Jewish family for nearly three years.
"It was never a question," says Pritchard, now 80 and a practicing psychoanalyst who lives in Vershire, Vt. "For somebody's life, how could you not?"
The straightforward woman with the clipped Dutch accent is puzzled by those who don't understand her conviction that hesitating in the face of evil is equal to siding with the enemy. Her brows knit together, she crosses her arms and asks, "What if nobody had done anything?"
"To my father, justice was everything," Pritchard says of her dad, a judge. "Not law and order, but justice." His philosophy shaped her idyllic girlhood in Amsterdam."I was never spanked, never hit," Pritchard says. "I got all my questions answered. When you are brought up that way, with complete love, respect, and understanding, that is how you try to treat people when you grow up."
When the Dutch government shocked its people by capitulating to the Nazis five days after the Germans invaded in May 1940, Pritchard remained true to her family's values. She aimed to "do whatever I could to get in the way of the Nazis." So when her supervisor asked her and her classmates at social work school to temporarily shelter Jewish children targeted for concentration camps Pritchard agreed. Despite the possibility of prison, or worse, she took a boy into her parents' home.
One morning in the spring of 1942, Pritchard watched Nazis load sobbing Jewish children into trucks. When they didn't move fast enough, the Nazis grabbed an arm or leg and threw them in. "I was so shocked I found myself in tears," Pritchard says. "Then I saw two women coming down the street to try to stop them, and the Germans threw them into the trucks, too. I stood frozen on my bicycle. When I saw that, I knew my rescue work was more important than anything else I might be doing." She was 22.
That summer, a friend in the Dutch resistance movement secured empty servants' quarters in a rural village as a refuge for a Jewish family. Pritchard volunteered to live with and care for them.
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