Real Heroes Don't Always Carry Guns

[cutiger83]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/marion-pritchard-dutch-rescuer-of-jewish-children-during-the-holocaust-dies-at-96/2016/12/20/d5ca50e0-c61b-11e6-bf4b-2c064d32a4bf_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_obit-pritchard-0950pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.8a869e91b29a

 

 

Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who was credited with saving dozens of Jews during the Holocaust, spiriting some to safe houses, hiding others under floorboards, and, in one case, executing a Nazi before he could arrest a family of four, died Dec. 11 in Washington. She was 96.

 

Mrs. Pritchard was recognized in 1981 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as one of the “righteous among the nations” — those gentiles who, seeking no reward, risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet that claimed 6 million lives during World War II.

She was said to have fed, clothed, hidden or otherwise aided as many as 150 people, many of them children.

 

Mrs. Pritchard — then Miss van Binsbergen — was 19 when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She credited her father, a Dutch judge who abhorred the Nazi ideology, and her mother, an Englishwoman who raised her daughter in the Anglican faith, with instilling in her a sense of justice and moral resolve.

 

The “crucial moment” for her came in 1942, she said, when she was riding her bicycle to her university in Amsterdam and witnessed the liquidation of a home for Jewish children. Deportation of Jews from the Netherlands began that year and would continue into 1944. Of 107,000 Jews taken away, all but 5,200 would perish. Less than 25 percent of Dutch Jewry survived the Holocaust, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

“It was a beautiful spring morning, and it was a street I had known since I had been born, and all of a sudden you see little kids picked up by their pigtails or by a leg and thrown over the side of a truck,” Mrs. Pritchard said in an interview published in the volume “Voices From the Holocaust” by Harry James Cargas. “You stop but you can’t believe it.”

 

She watched two women attempt to stop the soldiers, only to be put in the truck with the children. At that moment, she said, she committed herself to fighting Nazi persecution in whatever way possible.

 

 

[JBFloyd]

Extraordinary circumstances bring out the extraordinary in people otherwise considered "ordinary".

[BROBS]

Great story.. a true hero.

 

A true hero always does what's right.. no matter the risk.

 

Thanks for sharing.

-Brian

[Rakkasan187]

Shalom Marion,

 

Leigh