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As a salute to all the many women who fought in World War II, at home, in secret, in the service, we give you this collection of stories of real-life women. Like Agent Peggy Carter, too often their sacrifice and service was...
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Marion Pritchard with Erica Polak, a Jewish baby she was hiding, in 1944. Credit: Marion Pritchard, via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Marion Pritchard, Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Jews From Nazis, Dies at 96 By Richard Sandomir
Marion Pritchard, a gentile whose shock at watching Nazi soldiers storm a home for Jewish children in Amsterdam and load them into a truck for deportation inspired her to enter a clandestine world of rescuing Jews, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Washington. She was 96.
The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, her family said.
"By 1945, I had lied, stolen, cheated, deceived and even killed," Ms. Pritchard said in a lecture in 1996 at the University of Michigan, where she received the Wallenberg Medal, a humanitarian award given by the university in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II.
In the spring of 1942, Ms. Pritchard was a social work student who had been imbued by her father, a judge, with a strong sense of outrage about the injustices perpetrated against the Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. One day, she recalled, as she was riding her bicycle to class, she saw Nazis at the children's home "picking up the kids by an arm or a leg or by the hair" and throwing them into a truck.
"Well, I stopped my bike and looked," she said in an oral history recorded in 1984 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. "Two other women coming down on the street got so furious, they attacked the German soldiers, and they just picked the women up and threw them in the truck after the kids.
"I just stood there," she added. "I'm one of those people who sat there and watched it happen."
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Ms. Pritchard in her United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration uniform in 1946. Credit: Marion Pritchard, via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
