Marion Pritchard

Marion van Binsbergen Pritchard was a twenty year old Dutch social work student in Amsterdam in May 1940 when the Germans invaded the Netherlands. She had grown up in The Hague in a comfortable middle-class family, the daughter of a judge and the granddaughter of an English mother who had instilled in her, on her own later account, the basic Christian principle that one was responsible to act when one was confronted with injustice. The actionable confrontation came in late 1942 when she was passing a Jewish nursery at the Plantage Middenlaan in central Amsterdam and saw German guards loading Jewish children, some of them crying and being torn from their parents, onto a truck for deportation. She decided in that moment, on her later account, that she would do what she could to keep Jewish children out of those trucks.

The Dutch underground in 1942, 1943 was already running rescue networks for Jewish children, in particular the Utrecht Children’s Committee, the Amsterdam Studentenrat student resistance, and the Trouw and Vrij Nederland resistance newspapers. Pritchard joined the Utrecht network through a fellow social work student, Erica Stern, in late 1942. The network’s standard operation was to take Jewish children from the deportation collection points or from their parents’ apartments before the Germans came, place them with Dutch foster families across the central provinces, and produce false Dutch identity papers for the children that would allow them to pass the German checkpoints if questioned. Pritchard worked as a courier and a placement officer in this network for around fourteen months, between late 1942 and her arrest in February 1944.

The case for which she became most known was her shelter of the Polak family in a small farmhouse at Huizen, north of Amsterdam, between July 1943 and the German collapse in May 1945. The family consisted of Frederik Polak, a Jewish lawyer, and his three children, Lex, Tom and Erica, aged eight, six and four. Their mother had died of cancer before the war. Pritchard had taken the family in after the underground had run out of foster placements and had asked her to provide an emergency hide. The family lived in a hidden compartment under the floorboards of the farmhouse, accessed through a trapdoor under a kitchen rug. The compartment was around four feet high and twelve feet square. The family stayed there for twenty two months. Pritchard provided food, brought the children out for exercise at night, and gave the older children school lessons on the underground curriculum that had been improvised by the Utrecht network for hidden Jewish children.

The case took its critical turn in November 1943. A Dutch police officer working on commission for the Germans, named Karel Egbertus, came to the farmhouse on a routine search for hidden Jews. Pritchard had been warned by a neighbour and had moved the family into the under-floor compartment. Egbertus searched the house, found nothing, and left. He returned the same night with two German officers and a different police squad, on the suspicion that the warning he had observed at the previous house had been related to a hide. The squad found the trapdoor. Pritchard, who had a small pistol that the underground had given her some months earlier, shot Egbertus dead at the kitchen table. The Polak family stayed in the compartment. The German officers, with the police squad, withdrew under fire from the upstairs windows where Pritchard’s underground colleague Karel Poons had taken up a position. Pritchard and Poons disposed of Egbertus’s body that night with the help of a local undertaker who was a member of the network and who used a coffin in which a recently deceased local farmer was supposedly being buried. Egbertus’s disappearance was eventually attributed by the Germans to the wider Dutch underground rather than to the specific household.

Pritchard had killed a man. She lived with the moral weight of the act for the rest of her life and spoke about it in postwar interviews with characteristic directness. She had not regretted the act, she had regretted that the situation had made the act necessary, and she had thought from time to time about Egbertus’s wife and children, who had not been responsible for what their husband and father had been doing. The Polak family survived the war. Frederik Polak emigrated to the United States after the war and the children grew up there.

Pritchard herself emigrated to the United States in 1947, married the American Anton Pritchard and settled in Vershire, Vermont, where she practised as a psychoanalyst for the rest of her career. She testified at length to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and to the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s and 2000s. The footage is among the most thoughtful in the survivor archives. Yad Vashem named her Righteous Among the Nations in 1981. The Dutch state awarded her the Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous and recognised her work formally in the early 2000s. She died in Vershire on 11 December 2016 at the age of ninety six.

Pritchard was unusual among the Righteous in two respects. She was a young single woman who took on rescue work without the cover of a family or institutional position. And she had, at one decisive moment, chosen lethal force as the way to keep the Polak family alive. The case is therefore harder than the standard Righteous case to fit into the comfortable postwar narratives of moral courage. She herself preferred not to be made into a hero. She had said in 2008, on her last filmed interview, that she had simply done what any decent person would have done.

See also

Sources

  • Marion Pritchard, oral history interview, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 1995
  • Marion Pritchard, oral history interview, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1992 and 2004
  • Mark Klempner, The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage, Pilgrim Press, 2006
  • Yad Vashem, file on Marion van Binsbergen Pritchard, Righteous Among the Nations, 1981
  • Bert Jan Flim, Saving the Children: History of the Organized Effort to Rescue Jewish Children in the Netherlands, 1942, 1945, Vallentine Mitchell, 2005
  • Bob Moore, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe, Oxford University Press, 2010