JUSTICE By Samantha Levine

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.
"Jews in hiding couldn't be visible," she explains with a hint of
annoyance when asked her rationale. "They couldn't just go to the store.
So I stayed with them. It was the right thing to do." The Polak
family-Fred and his children, 4-year-old Lex, 2-year-old Tom, and newborn
Erica-stayed with her until the war ended in 1945. (The mother was
separated from the family but reunited with them after the war.) There
was nowhere to hide other than a tiny compartment under the living room,
so Fred spent each day upstairs in a nurse's house across the street and
worked on his doctoral dissertation. The children, who passed for
gentiles, could play in the yard. Though many of the neighbors knew what
she was doing, they were "good Dutchmen, anti-Nazi, and rescuers in their
own way," Pritchard says. They sneaked her milk and vegetables to
supplement her meager rations. Pritchard struggled to keep house while
finding havens for other Jews.
By the time the war ended, the Nazis had murdered approximately 110,000
of the Netherlands' 140,000 Jews. Pritchard had helped find hiding places
or transport to safe houses for more than 150. "I tried," she says, "but
many were only saved temporarily."
Pritchard was an exemplary rescuer because she chose to risk her life
when she saw Jewish children being hauled away, says Malka Drucker, who
coauthored Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust. "She
was frozen in fear and indecision, so she decided to become a rescuer."
For all her bravery, Pritchard is haunted by that night she shot the
policeman. She was fortunate local authorities did not pursue the missing
man-hatred for Nazis and Dutch turncoats seethed in the village. And she
was extremely lucky that friends and supporters disposed of the body.
Karel Poons, a gay Jew who was her former ballet teacher, risked his life
to sneak out after curfew and persuade the baker to take the body in his
horse-drawn cart to the undertaker, who stashed it in an occupied coffin
slated for burial. Still, Pritchard feared being found out. "I had to go
on, to stay strong for the family," she says. "I wish it hadn't been
necessary. But it was the better of two evils."
© 2001 U.S.News & World Report Inc. All rights reserved. 8-18-2001