Marion Pritchard

Marion Pritchard (birth name: Marion Philippine van Binsbergen ; born November 7, 1920 in Amsterdam , † December 11, 2016 in Washington, DC ) was a Dutch rescuer of the Jews . After the Second World War she emigrated to the USA and worked as a psychoanalyst . In 1981 she was named Righteous Among the Nations . From 1997, at the age of 77, she and Debórah Dwork had a teaching position in a seminar at Clark University .

Life

Marion van Binsbergen had a younger brother and was the daughter of Jacob and Grace van Binsbergen. Her mother was a native of England and Marion grew up in England, where she attended boarding school, and in Amsterdam. In her youth she was a scout .

After graduating from high school, she studied social work. The Netherlands had been invaded by Germany in 1940 . In 1941 Marion van Binsbergen was arrested innocently because BBC news, according to the Nazi term enemy broadcasters , was listened to and copied in the same building . She was detained for six months.

Then from 1942 (shaped by her father, who had a strong sense of justice), she began to campaign for persecuted Jews. At the beginning of the year she had seen the Nazis ruthlessly throwing young children from a children's home onto a truck . Shaped by this experience, she then passed off Jewish children as her own and provided them with places to live with non-Jewish families. She also helped persecuted Jews to obtain false identity papers, and she also provided them with medical care and food. She concealed this from her family so as not to endanger them.

Her most famous rescue was that of Lex and Tom Polak. After her foster mother asked her for a safe place, Marion looked for it 15 km outside of Amsterdam. There, the children were taught to disappear at lightning speed through some floorboards under the table into the cellar if they heard suspicious noises. After a check, the children came back upstairs. But the Nazis had also learned that people in hiding felt safe after being checked, and a Dutch SS man checked them again. To save the children, Marion van Binsbergen shot him with a pistol.

After the war she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration . While at work she met Anton Prichard, who ran a prisoner of war camp in Bavaria, and married him. They moved to the United States in 1947 and had three sons.

In 1981 she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem .

Marion Pritchard died in December 2016 at the age of 96.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Richard Sandomir: Marion Pritchard, Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Jews From Nazis, Dies at 96 . In: The New York Times , September 23, 2016, accessed January 8, 2017.