Social Studies 11 - The Table

Deciding to Act

In 1942, Marion Pritchard was a graduate student in German-occupied Amsterdam. She was

not Jewish, but she observed what was happening to the Jews of her city. One morning, while

riding her bicycle to class, she witnessed a scene outside an orphanage for Jewish children that

changed her life:

The Germans were loading the children, who ranged in age from babies to eight-year-olds,

on trucks. They were upset, and crying. When they did not move fast enough the Nazis

picked them up, by an arm, a leg, the hair, and threw them into the trucks. To watch grown

men treat small children that way—I could not believe my eyes. I found myself literally

crying with rage. Two women coming down the street tried to interfere physically. The

Germans heaved them into the truck, too. I just sat there on my bicycle, and that was the

moment I decided that if there was anything I could do to thwart such atrocities, I would

do it.

Marion Pritchard holds Erika Polak, one of the children she saved from the Nazis.

Working with the Dutch resistance, Pritchard helped to save more than 150 children

during World War II.

Some of my friends had similar experiences, and about ten of us, including two Jewish

students who decided they did not want [to] go into hiding, organized very informally for

this purpose. We obtained Aryan identity cards for the Jewish students, who, of course,

were taking more of a risk than we were. They knew many people who were looking to . . .

“disappear,” as Anne Frank and her family were to do.

We located hiding places, helped people move there, provided food, clothing, and ration

cards, and sometimes moral support and relief for the host families. We registered

newborn Jewish babies as gentiles . . . and provided medical care when possible.

The decision to rescue Jews often led to other difficult choices. Pritchard described what

happened when she agreed to hide a Jewish family:

The father, the two boys, and the baby girl moved in and we managed to survive the next

two years, until the end of the war. Friends helped take up the floorboards, under the rug,

and build a hiding place in case of raids. . . . One night we had a very narrow escape.

Four Germans, accompanied by a Dutch Nazi policeman came and searched the house.

They did not find the hiding place, but they had learned from experience that sometimes it

paid to go back to a house they had already searched, because by then the hidden Jews

might have come out of the hiding place. The baby had started to cry, so I let the children

out. Then the Dutch policeman came back alone. I had a small revolver that a friend had

given me, but I had never planned to use it. I felt I had no choice except to kill him. I

would do it again, under the same circumstances, but it still bothers me. . . . If anybody

had really tried to find out how and where he disappeared, they could have, but the general

attitude was that there was one less traitor to worry about. A local undertaker helped

dispose of the body, he put it in a coffin with a legitimate body in it. . . .

Was I scared? Of course, the answer is “yes.” . . . There were times that the fear got the

better of me, and I did not do something that I could have. I would rationalize the inaction,

feeling it might endanger others, or that I should not run a risk, because what would

happen to the three children I was now responsible for, if something happened to me, but

I knew when I was rationalizing.

In reflecting on her choices and those made by others during the war, Pritchard was troubled

by a “tendency to divide the general population during the war into a few ‘good guys’ and the

large majority of ‘bad guys.’ That seems to me to be a dangerous oversimplification . . . The

point I want to make is that there were indeed some people who behaved criminally by

betraying their Jewish neighbors and thereby sentencing them to death. There were some

people who dedicated themselves to actively rescuing as many people as possible. Somewhere

in between was the majority, whose actions varied from the minimum decency of at least

keeping quiet if they knew where Jews were hidden to finding a way to help when they were

asked.”