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Resistance group Dalfsen Ommen Lemelerveld with Jan Houtman, front row at the right

November 09, 1944 THE NETHERLANDS

 

Resistance group Dalfsen Ommen Lemelerveld with right front Jan Houtman. The photo was taken in the Rechterense Bos after 11-09-1944 when the two soldiers landed in the photo in Dalfsen and before 27-11-1944 when Houtman was murdered in Lenthe.

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The Dutch Rescuer Who "Lied, Stole, and Even Killed" to Save the Lives of 150 Jewish Children During WWII

Amsterdam in 1942 THE NETHERLANDS

 

While riding her bicycle to class at her university in Amsterdam in 1942, Marion Pritchard chanced upon a group of Nazi soldiers liquidating a Jewish children's home and watched helplessly as they violently threw young children into a truck. This encounter transformed the life of the young Dutch woman forever, leading her to become an active resister to the Nazi regime and ultimately save the lives of 150 Jewish children during World War II. Over three years, she risked her life numerous times by hiding Jewish refugees, arranging falsified identification papers, finding non-Jewish homes to take in Jewish children, and performing what was known as the "mission of disgrace" by falsely registering herself as the unwed mother of newborn babies to conceal their Jewish identity. "Most of us were brought up to tell [the] truth, to obey the secular law and the Ten Commandments," Pritchard reflected in 1996 during a lecture about her wartime experience. "By 1945, I had lied, stolen, cheated, deceived and even killed."

 

Born in Amsterdam on November 7, 1920, Pritchard was the daughter of a judge who abhorred the Nazi ideology and instilled in his daughter a strong sense of justice and moral resolve. When the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, Pritchard, then Marion van Binsbergen, was a 19-year-old social work student. She opposed the regime from the onset, but it was this chance encounter, during which she witnessed the the violent round-up of children who ranged in age from 2 to 8, that moved her to action.

 

“It was a beautiful spring morning, and it was a street I had known since I had been born," she recalled, "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... You stop but you can’t believe it.” It was then, she said, "I knew my rescue work was more important than anything else I might be doing." By the war's end, the German occupiers and their Dutch collaborators had deported 107,000 Dutch Jews to concentration camps, of which only 5,200 survived; in total, between 75 to 80 percent of the Netherlands' Jews were murdered during the war, the highest rate in Western Europe.

 

Working with friends in the Dutch Resistance, Pritchard began to hide, feed, and otherwise aid Jewish refugees, helping save the lives of approximately 150 people, most of them children. She used her social work training to help find and prepare families for harboring Jewish children illegally. She also took up residence in the country home of an acquaintance to help care for a Jewish man in hiding with his three young children for nearly three years. Fearful of the Nazis' nighttime raids, the Polak family would hide in a hidden pit whenever a vehicle approached. After one such raid, the Nazis left after failing to find the hiding place but a Dutch collaborator returned to surprise them a half hour later after the children had already left the pit. Convinced he would turn the family over to the Nazis, Pritchard shot and killed the intruder; “I would do it again, under the same circumstances,” she told an interviewer years later, “but it still bothers me.” The family survived the war thanks to her care and protection.

 

After the war, Pritchard worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in displaced-persons camps in Germany. There, she met Anton Pritchard, a United States Army officer who was running a camp in Bavaria. They were married and moved to the U.S. in 1947, eventually settling in Vermont. For many years, she helped refugee families settle in the U.S. and worked as a psychoanalyst. In 1981, she was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Pritchard, who died in 2016, also received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Vermont.

 

Her spirit of compassion in action lives on today thanks to the students she taught at an annual seminar at Clark University in Massachusetts. "Some of our students chose their professions referencing Marion," says Deborah Dwork, a professor of Holocaust history. "One of them just finished her dissertation on women rescuers and perpetrators in Rwanda. She wrote to me and said, 'This is all about Marion'.... Not only did she save lives during the 1940s, but she continues to save lives today through her influence."

 

A Mighty Girl Staff

A Mighty Girl

 

Disclaimer: This article, in this website, despite the coincidences, in no way suggests that Ms. Marion Pritchard was the person who rescued Joe Gosler

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How a Young Audrey Hepburn Helped the Dutch Resistance During World War II

Actor and dancer Audrey Hepburn rehearsing at the barre, circa 1950

 

Biographers and many Dutch people who lived through World War II have doubted the participation of a young Audrey Hepburn in work for the Resistance against the Nazis, saying, “She was just a girl. What could she possibly have done?” But as she was under the influence of such an enterprising and patriotic character as local Resistance leader Dr. Hendrik Visser ’t Hooft, the many stories she told about her activities in the war become highly plausible.

 

First and foremost, with the encouragement of Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, for whom she volunteered, she could dance. Audrey’s celebrity as a ballerina for nearly four years at the Arnhem city theater made her talents valuable to Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and the Resistance for illegal musical performances at various by-invitation-only locations. These events, called the zwarte avonden, or “black evenings,” had first been introduced by musicians as a way to earn money after they had been forced out of the Dutch mainstream by the Nazi union of artists, the Kultuurkamer. Soon the zwarte avonden were helping to raise funds in support of those sheltering the tens of thousands of Jews and other people in hiding across the Netherlands — including those in her hometown of Velp. They were known as black evenings because windows were blacked out or darkened so the Germans didn’t know of the activities going on inside.

 

The first documented involvement of Audrey’s family, the van Heemstras, with the zwarte avonden took place on April 23, 1944, when at least one van Heemstra, and likely both Audrey and her mother Ella, attended an illegal performance, their family name listed among those present. From that point on, Audrey wanted to participate.

 

By this time she, like most Dutch young people, was already suffering symptoms of malnutrition, yet still she danced. “I was quite able to perform and it was some way in which I could make some kind of contribution,” she said.

 

In another interview Audrey said: “I did indeed give various underground concerts to raise money for the Dutch Resistance movement. I danced at recitals, designing the dances myself. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother made the costumes. They were very amateurish attempts, but nevertheless at the time, when there was very little entertainment, it amused people and gave them an opportunity to get together and spend a pleasant afternoon listening to music and seeing my humble attempts. The recitals were given in houses with windows and doors closed, and no one knew they were going on. Afterwards, money was collected and given to the Dutch Underground.”

 

Many of the events in which Audrey performed were staged in the home of homeopathic physician Dr. Jacobus T. Wouters, who lived in a large villa at the corner of Ringallee and Bosweg in Velp, not far from the home of the van Heemstras. Wouters wasn’t a member of Velp’s inner circle of physicians, but his willingness to host a series of black evenings proved his patriotism. Ella also hosted at least one illegal black evening at the van Heemstra home, Villa Beukenhof, during which her daughter danced. The Resistance events were high risk, with danger always present.

 

“Guards were posted outside to let us know when Germans approached,” said Audrey, who reported that “the best audiences I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance.” They had reason to be cautious because lives depended upon it. Evil lurked in Velp. It had arrived with top Nazis, like the ruler of the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart and his SS henchman Hanns Albin Rauter, and the basing of national Nazi secret police operations inside the Park Hotel. Audrey passed close by this evil in downtown Velp one day, and what she heard stayed with her for the remainder of her life. She was walking with her mother along Hoofdstraat past the Hotel Naeff. At the intersection with Vijverlaan, just four blocks from the Beukenhof, they waited for traffic to clear by the venerable Rotterdamsche Bank, a brick and stone building with a turret on the corner. Audrey looked up at the bank, the city’s most solid structure, which the Dutch security police had commandeered to hold political prisoners. She said she heard “the most awful sounds coming out of this building. It was then explained to me [by my mother] that it was a prison and perhaps people were being tortured. Those are things you don’t forget.”

 

Read more at the Time Magazine

 

 

 

ROBERT MATZEN MAY 3, 2019

Time Magazine