Marion Pritchard, pictured above, who was credited with helping to save 150 Jewish neighbors after the Nazis occupied her native Holland, will be honored Sunday at the Or Shalom Synagogue in Orange, New Jersey, as part of the synagogue’s annual Kristallnacht remembrance.
Senator Richard Blumenthal will be there to present a Senate Commendation to Marion’s son Arnie, as Marion passed away last year at the age of 96.
Baby Erica, in Marion’s lap above, who is still very much alive, and who had “primal memories” of having “another mother” - prompting her to reunite with Marion years after the war and after Marion had married a G.I. and moved to the States - will be flying in from Holland to honor her second mom.
Marion’s son Arnie and Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus remember:
“Arnie Pritchard said his mother wasn’t “gifted with nerves of steel”— she once was terrified when a bat was flying around the house — yet she endured so much risk during that dark time in history when over 6 million Jews were killed.
It’s not that she didn’t feel the fear. She was able to overcome it,” said Arnie Pritchard, who came to New Haven in 1970 to attend graduate school at Yale University and settled here.
While she was sheltering the Polack family of four, Marion Pritchard even fatally shot a Nazi officer who came to the door — if the family had been found, they would have been sent to a death camp — then covered up his death by getting a local mortician to put him in a casket with another dead body.
Pritchard famously said in hindsight, according to Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus of Or Shalom synagogue in Orange:
“I lied, stole and even killed … I had to save those children … I would do it again.”
It’s hard to face the shattering reality that 70 years after the courage and sacrifice of Marion, and scores of millions like her, buried that hateful flag in the rubble of war torn Europe, we are faced with it’s nightmarish resurrection today.
Do the courage and resolve Marion displayed still reside in humanity?
I hope we don’t have to find out.