Holocaust hero who saved children, shot Nazi, to be honored
Arnie Pritchard said his mother wasn’t “gifted with nerves of steel,” yet she endured so much risk to save the lives of Jewish children.
By PAM MCLOUGHLIN / NEW HAVEN REGISTER CONN.Updated: NOVEMBER 6, 2017 10:06
ORANGE, Connecticut, USA (TNS) — Arnie Pritchard of New Haven and his two brothers knew in a general way growing up that their mother, Marion Pritchard, had sheltered Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust.But it wasn’t until 1981, when they were well into adulthood, that they learned the details and scope of her heroism when their mother received the Righteous Among the Nations award from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.It would turn out that, while in her early 20s in Holland, Marion Pritchard risked her life many times over by assisting in saving some 150 Jews, mostly children, killing a man with her pistol to protect a Jewish family and sheltering a Jewish family with an infant for three years. She was even imprisoned for her resistance work.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, Connecticut: “I lied, stole and even killed … I had to save those children … I would do it again.”Wainhaus said killing the Nazi always haunted her.Marion Pritchard loved children.One of those children, Erica Polack, was a baby when she arrived with her father and two siblings to be cared and hidden by Pritchard, a social worker, who had to give her “sleeping powder” at night to keep her quiet.