The Courage to Kill A Nazi
Marion Pritchard and the Complexities of Heroism in World War II
The rumble of a truck engine on the desolate country road served as a warning.
The Nazis were coming.
The family knew the routine. Fred Polak and his three children, two young boys and infant daughter Erica, descended into a secret hiding place under the floorboards in the living room.
It was 1943, and the Nazis occupied Holland. On some nights after curfew, they swept the houses in the countryside outside of Amsterdam, searching for Jews in hiding. This house, as far as the Nazis knew, was solely occupied by Marion van Binsbergen, a 22-year-old student of social work. A Dutch police officer, a known Nazi collaborator, suspected otherwise.
The Polaks, a Jewish family, completed the routine of hiding in less than a minute. Some nights, Fred or Marion would administer sleeping powder to infant Erica, ensuring that she wouldn’t cry and reveal the family. That night, they didn’t give it to her.
There was a knock at the door. Marion opened the home to three Nazis and the Dutch police officer.
They searched the house, looking for clues, but Marion was clever. She employed tactics to disguise the Polaks’ presence. For example, she shared her bed, ensuring that the other beds remained pristine and appeared unused.
Finding nothing, the Nazis returned to the living room. Baby Erica remained quiet, even without the sleeping powder. The Polaks, separated from the Nazis only by thin floorboards, were safe.
The four intruders left, and the family emerged from hiding once the sound of the engine receded into the distance. The three Nazis drove into the night, but they were down one passenger.
The Dutch police officer waited in the darkness near the house, a patient predator unwilling to give up on his prey. Each Jew he turned in to the Nazis earned him five dollars.
After half an hour, the officer burst into the house through an unlocked back door. He hastened to the living room, discovering Marion with the three Jewish children. The entrance to the hiding place was open. Fred was still down there, working on his PhD thesis at a small desk.
Marion made a split-second decision she would never forget.
She reached behind the books on the shelf, grabbing a revolver, a gift from the resistance she never expected to use.
Standing only feet away, she shot the Dutch police officer, killing him.
“My instinct was if I didn’t get rid of him the kids were doomed,” Marion said years later in her testimony for The Shoah Foundation.
Karel Poons, a Jewish ballet dancer and close friend to Marion who was in hiding at the neighboring house, came over. Marion was justifiably upset.
How would she dispose of the body? What would happen if the Nazis returned?
Karel calmed Marion. He came up with a plan. The next day, the village baker, a friend of Karel’s, transported the body into town on his wagon. He delivered it to the undertaker, a friend of the resistance.
The undertaker placed the dead Nazi collaborator into a coffin alongside the corpse a citizen. The funeral was that day and the citizen’s body was buried, along with the evidence of Marion’s crime.
In the ensuing weeks and months, Marion became paranoid that the Nazis would return. To her surprise, they didn’t. Nobody came looking for the Dutch police officer. Nobody asked questions. Nobody appeared to miss his malicious presence. People didn’t seem to care. Perhaps some were relieved.
“I always wonder whether the funeral director told the family if there was an extra body in the coffin or not,” Marion said.
“I just hope they would have approved.”
When I shared a part of my grandfather’s story on Twitter, I was surprised by the many responses that immediately proclaimed him to be “a hero.”
My grandfather will be the first to tell you that the primary factor in his survival was luck. There were several twists of fate and a few acts of kindness from others that made the determination between life and death.
A piece of roast beef fell into his arms on The Death March and nobody noticed.
An SS officer caught him stealing dog biscuits but decided not to torture or execute him.
Another SS officer aiming to shoot him in the back of his head missed and hit him in the side of his neck and upper shoulder.
A Polish citizen who worked with my grandfather inside the coal mines outside of Birkenau secretly brought him a sandwich every day. The average time of survival for a prisoner in the mines was seven to ten days. My grandfather lasted thirteen months, and he credits the extra sustenance with giving him strength.
Persistence in the face of almost certain death is itself heroic, but from speaking extensively with my grandfather over the years, I’ve learned that there was little rational decision-making on his part. He was operating on instinct, doing what he could to make it through each day.
I am not seeking to diminish my grandfather’s extraordinary experiences. I will forever be awestruck by his will to live in the most dire of circumstances. It’s a will that still exists, complicating the aging process and the reality of his incurable illness, from which survival is not possible. Twists of fate can postpone but never prevent the inevitability of death, the same ending we all must face.
The life we lead and the choices we make before reaching that moment are significant.
To hurt or heal. To support or neglect. To be kind or cruel. To be giving or selfish. To be intolerant or understanding.
To me, a hero is someone who makes the choice to help others without the promise of personal gain and often despite personal risk. One doesn’t have to save a life to be a hero, and the act of saving a life is not always heroic.
After watching Marion van Binsbergen Pritchard’s testimony along with hours of additional interviews and speeches, I believe she was a hero.
I don’t know if Marion Pritchard would agree. I will never know, as she passed away in 2016 at the age of 96.
There is a softness and humility in the way she tells her story. She doesn’t flinch while recounting her shooting of the Dutch officer, telling it in a matter-of-fact way that keeps her actions grounded. There isn’t a hint of pride or boastfulness.
In fact, Marion gives her friend Karel credit for saving the day. Before Karel arrived, she thought she was in “serious trouble.” She didn’t know what to do next, how to conceal what happened without getting caught by the Nazis. Her only idea was to bury the body in the yard, an act she was sure would be noticed.
Karel solved the problem of what to do with the dead Dutch collaborator, saving the children’s lives for a second time and likely Marion’s, too.
Marion tells this tense tale with calm detachment, yet moments later, the topic shifts to the seemingly mundane and her emotions break through.
The interviewer asks how Marion got along with the children while they were living with her. Marion describes how they would all play together, though there weren’t many toys. They would use burnt matches to draw on the floor and pretend that wooden blocks were cars.
Marion stops speaking. She turns to the side and puts a hand over her mouth, one of the few long pauses in her over three-hour testimony. Gathering herself, she turns back to the interviewer.
“I was starting to tell about getting rid of the body,” she says, “but it feels funny to talk about toys and relationships.”
Children played a central role in Marion’s decision to become a rescuer, and her efforts focused on saving the lives of young ones.
Marion was motivated to action when one day in 1942, she was riding her bike home from her university program in social work and witnessed Nazi soldiers loading Jewish children into a truck. The children had been under the secret care of several matrons, whose operation of hiding both Dutch and German Jews was unearthed by the Nazis.
Marion watched as a Nazi lifted a little girl by her pigtails and threw her into the truck.
The matrons emerged from the building, protesting the removal of the children. The Nazis grabbed the women and forced them into the truck, too.
It was the tipping point for Marion.
From that moment forward, she took tremendous action to rescue children. She helped transport them out of Amsterdam, sending them to live in secret with non-Jewish families in the north of Holland.
She learned early on that the resistance’s efforts were purposely cloaked in mystery. The less she knew about the children’s origins and destinations, the less likely the Nazis could torture her for information.
Marion also helped secure false identity papers for Jewish children by claiming them as her own. This would require her to take each child to town hall on a “mission of disgrace,” where she would announce that the baby was born out of wedlock. Suffering this embarrassment, Marion gave these Jewish children a chance at survival.
For two and a half years, from late 1942 until the end of the war, Marion lived with Fred Polak and his three children, acting as a mother especially to Erica, who was born in 1943 and delivered into hiding soon after.
There were still more children rescued by Marion during this time. With the help of her friend Karel once again, Marion kidnapped a little girl named Kathinka Bosch, who was being held captive in the house where she was hiding. The Nazis were en route to pick up Kathinka, with plans to torture the child in front of her parents so that her mother would give up information about the resistance.
But Marion and Karel got there first. While Karel distracted the guard at the front door, Marion snuck through the back door and went upstairs to rescue Kathinka. She grabbed hold of the toddler, instructed her to be very quiet, and silently descended the stairs, avoiding detection. Marion loaded Kathinka into the basket of her bicycle and sped away, delivering the child into hiding.
Kathinka survived the war. She was reunited with her mother and father in August of 1945.
Marion even helped usher new life into the world. She brought together a young Jewish couple who had been separated: one was in hiding and the other was passing as non-Jewish with false papers. The pair had decided the best way to fight Hitler’s plan of Judenfrei, to literally “cleanse” the earth of Jews, was to procreate.
They conceived. Marion was present for the birth, soon delivering the Jewish baby into hiding. The child survived the war, but the parents did not.
Despite her heroics, Marion acknowledges in her testimony that the choice to rescue children was far easier than the decision made by their parents.
The Jewish parents had to select one of two terrible options. The first was to take the Nazis at their word — Marion notes that very little was known about the concentration camps by the people in Holland. The Nazis promised the Jewish families that despite the difficulty of work at the camps, parents and children would be allowed to remain together.
The second option was for the parents to hand off their children to a ragtag group of young resistors, strangers who could not tell them anything about where the children were going or who would take care of them. Communication was impossible, and there was no guarantee of future reunion. It was a risk, an unknown.
Marion concludes, “The greatest rescuers of children were the parents who gave them up.”
Perhaps they were the most heroic of all.
In 1947, Marion and her husband Tony Pritchard, a soldier in the U.S. Army, moved to the United States. Tony eventually completed his undergraduate education at Harvard, and the couple lived adjacent to campus at 1697 Cambridge Street.
Hearing Marion describe the location, I realized I had walked by this apartment building many times.
Steps away is Harvard’s Memorial Hall, a Gothic structure that houses Sanders Theater, a large performance space but also where undergraduate courses with sizeable enrollment meet.
A half-century after the Pritchards were in Cambridge, I was beginning my freshman year at Harvard. I walked into Sanders Theater to sample the first lecture of a course called Justice, taught by political philosopher Michael Sandel.
Dr. Sandel introduced the Trolley Problem, a hypothetical situation meant to spark debate on ethics and moral psychology. Years later, it struck me that Marion’s account of killing the Nazi collaborator to save the children was a variant of the Trolley Problem.
Here’s the scenario. There’s a runaway trolley or train going full-steam, heading towards a group of five people tied to the tracks who cannot escape. They have only one hope of survival.
There’s a split in the tracks before them and a lever that can change the train’s course. On the opposite track, however, there’s a single person trapped in the same predicament. Five on one track, one on the other.
You’re standing in front of the lever. If you pull it, the train will divert, running over and killing the lone person instead of the group of five. If you do nothing, the train will continue its course, and the five will meet their demise.
You have two options: pull the lever or don’t.
What do you do?
Dr. Sandel posed the question to a few hundred students, his voice resonating off the walls of the ornately decorated theater. He waited in silence. The wood on the pews creaked as students shifted their weight, then began to murmur to each other.
A petrified freshman, I decided to save myself the potential embarrassment of giving the wrong answer to a crowd of my peers.
As the first brave student answered and then a few more, I realized there was no right answer.
Some students asked who were they to decide another human’s fate, reasoning that they would leave the lever as they found it.
Others said it was their obligation to save five lives at the cost of one.
Another argued the lack of information made it impossible to assign value to any of the lives.
Then, someone asked, “What do we know about the people on the tracks?”
This opened up the discussion, and Dr. Sandel presented variations to the original scenario. The choice seemed easier when there were stories attached to the hypothetical characters.
It was a different decision if the lone captive was a skilled researcher on the brink of curing cancer, or a wily bandit who trapped the five on the other track. Surely the villain deserved to die, while a researcher with the potential to save countless others deserved to live.
Right?
This question of personal narrative is central to our examination of The Holocaust, one of the most harrowing epochs in modern history.
What do we know about the people who lived through it? Were they brave or cowardly? Heroic or villainous? Helpful or hurtful?
In several different interviews, Marion acknowledges that nothing was distinct. One person could be a perpetrator, a bystander, a rescuer, and a victim — sometimes all in the same day.
Marion talks about Dutch officers who warned Jews hours before Nazis raided their neighborhoods. Some helped the Jewish families safely escape. Yet, the same officers would return with the Nazis later in the evening, rounding up the remaining Jews to be transported to concentration camps.
Marion faced a Trolley Problem of her own when the Nazi collaborator returned to her house to find the children out of hiding. She was forced to make a decision, her hand on the metaphorical lever.
The lives of four — five including herself — or the life of one.
“I’m against capital punishment,” Marion says in her testimony, “but it was a choice between the kids and him.”
The background story of the traitorous Dutch officer makes the decision seem simple. We fundamentally understand that three innocent children deserve to live instead of a man who would trade each of their lives for five dollars.
My assessment is that Marion made the correct choice in her Trolley Problem. She was a hero.
Examining the larger narrative reveals complexities in the situation, including the one person who spent a lifetime reluctant to acknowledge Marion’s heroics:
Edwina Moor, the biological mother of Lex, Tom, and Erica Polak — the children in hiding.
During Marion’s testimony for The Shoah Foundation, the interviewer asks about her relationship with Fred Polak and his children during the years they lived with her, from 1942 to1945.
Marion says she “got along fine” with Tom (2) and that Lex (4) “was always homesick for his mother.”
When speaking about Erica, Marion says:
“[My relationship] was obviously very good with the baby, because I was the only mother she’d ever known.”
In an interview given in1999 when she was 56 years old, Erica Polak speaks about Marion and addresses the absence of her biological mother in the first few years of her life.
Erica was born in August of 1943 during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Her mother, Edwina Moor, was half-Jewish. Edwina had legitimate papers of citizenship, the same as any non-Jewish resident of Holland, and these enabled her to travel freely.
Edwina, Erica says, was “a big shot in the resistance,” actively working against the Nazis. Her husband Fred, however, was Jewish, so the safest place for him and the children was in hiding with Marion, beginning in 1942.
After spending three months in the hospital with Edwina, the infant Erica was taken to the rest of her family.
“When I was a baby,” Erica says, “I was never outside of hiding. It was my beginning.”
It was the only life she knew for three formative years. Marion was her sole maternal figure.
This would prove to be a source of lifelong tension between Edwina Moor and Marion Pritchard. Erica explains that there was “a rivalry” between the two women.
The existence of this strain is at first perplexing, since one might assume Edwina would be grateful to Marion for risking her own life to save Edwina’s family.
The psychology of hidden children and families, however, is complicated. After the war, some surviving children felt anger towards their parents for abandoning them, amplified by the fact that hidden children were oftentimes passed around to multiple families, a fractured upbringing. Some surviving parents felt guilt for releasing their children to unknown circumstances.
When Erica is asked about Marion and her mother, she breathes a deep sigh.
“This is sort of a complex issue.”
Erica recalls that after the war, between the ages of three and six, she was a somber child. In retrospect, she recognizes that she was mourning the loss of her surrogate mother, Marion, who exited her life completely in 1945. It would be another thirty-two years before the two would see each other again.
Marion went to work for The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, managing a displaced-persons camp in Germany, where she met and married her husband, Tony Pritchard.
Marion wanted to help survivors get their lives back together after the war, but she admits that there was another motivation for her to leave Holland.
Marion knew it would be hard to stay away from the Polak family.
She did not want to get in the way of Edwina bonding with her children. Marion abandoned her adopted family hoping that her absence would bring about a return to normalcy for the Polaks.
What Marion said about Jewish parents was, in a way, also true about her.
“The greatest rescuers of children were the parents who gave them up.”
Marion gave up Erica, a child she loved, into the arms of someone who despite biology was a stranger.
Life from that point forward was not easy for Erica or her biological mother Edwina.
“I never rebonded with my own mother,” Erica says.
Edwina did not express a warmth or fondness for Erica. When speaking about the time before the war with her two sons Lex and Tom, Edwina would say what wonderful, beautiful boys they were.
When referring to Erica, she would say, “You were a horrible baby.”
Edwina and husband Fred agreed to never speak about Marion. It was a sore subject, a “rivalry,” as Erica notes.
Despite Marion’s bravery during the war, Edwina did not consider her in a positive light. The view of heroism changes in light of personal psychology and the larger narrative.
Three decades after the war’s end, Erica Polak had a baby of her own. For the first time, she felt compelled to reach out to Marion. The maternal bond she forged with her own child rekindled long-dormant feelings she experienced with Marion.
Erica has no distinct memory of the war. She doesn’t remember the time she spent with Marion or hiding from the Nazis underneath the floorboards.
Yet, Erica describes an emotional reunion with Marion thirty-two years later.
“When I saw her for the first time, I was thirty-five. I felt so at home with her. I felt so close.”
When they hugged, Marion said to Erica, “I never had a daughter myself because I had one already, and that’s you.”
“I was in tears when she told me,” Erica says in her interview, “and I could cry at a moment now because it gives, well, it gives something to the feeling we connect together but have a whole life without each other.”
Erica eventually asked Marion how she was as a child, wondering if she was the “horrible baby” her mother described. Marion said she wasn’t.
“You were just a funny little girl. There was nothing wrong with you.”
“When I connected to Marion, I was so happy,” Erica says. “It was one of the best feelings I had in my life. I understood that she felt more [like] a mother for me than my own mother.”
What came next reiterates the complex psychology of hidden children. After the rush of the initial connection, Erica found herself experiencing something unexpected.
“Then came also this angriness that [Marion] left me. After I met her and felt the good feeling, at the same time I felt all the bad feelings that came with it.
“It’s still a difficult issue in my life.”
Marion’s choice to leave the Polak family, allowing them the chance to reconnect by removing herself from the children’s lives, was painful for Erica. She was first abandoned by her biological mother only to later be abandoned by her surrogate.
The narrative, unfolded and examined, is no longer black and white. The sharp distinctions of heroes and villains fade, simply revealing humans trying to do their best through a traumatic time.
Erica stayed in contact with Marion after their first reunion.
Edwina, on the other hand, had no relationship with Marion, not after the war or later in life.
It’s futile at this point to consider why — whether it was an inability to cope with the guilt of leaving her children to be raised by someone else, or perhaps a jealousy that Marion shared in the children’s formative years while Edwina was with the resistance.
There is, however, evidence that Edwina Moor ultimately accepted the role that Marion Pritchard played in the lives of Lex, Tom, and Erica.
On her deathbed, Edwina gave Erica one final instruction:
Tell Marion Pritchard that she said, “Thank you.”
Heroism is subjective.
One need only to consult the list of history’s greatest monsters, including the Führer of Nazi Germany, for illustration of this concept. While most view the villainous for who they were, there are nevertheless those with twisted logic who see them as heroes.
The question is why are we compelled to label heroes?
What purpose does it serve to stamp the title of hero on someone, especially when we don’t know them personally, the way so many did after reading a small part of my grandfather’s story?
The answer is related to our desire to give a firm response to the Trolley Problem: we want to draw lines of morality, to decide what’s right and wrong, what’s good and bad.
It’s a way of simplifying the world to give us the sense that we understand it. A black and white world of heroes and villains is far easier to comprehend than one with infinite shades of gray.
Yet, as we’ve seen with Marion Pritchard, the more we learn about the story of a person’s life, the more complex it becomes.
The entire narrative, stretched out and scrutinized, is less distinct.
Thus, we try to reverse engineer it. We simplify. We pull out bite-sized morsels of the story because they are easier to digest, in hopes that they will reveal a kernel of truth.
This is perhaps why the Twitter thread about my grandfather’s experience on The Death March garnered so much attention. The story of the roast beef is compelling, a small but illuminating part of a complex narrative.
It’s also why obituaries of Marion Pritchard center around her heroism in shooting the Dutch collaborator to save the lives of the Polak family. It’s a simple yet breathtaking version of the Trolley Problem: save four Jewish innocents for the price of one Nazi. The good guys win, the bad guy loses.
Beneath the surface of that story, the narrative becomes more complex and as a result, more human. It’s precisely how we discover the perspectives of Erica and Edwina, previously not addressed in pieces about Marion.
In the scope of larger narratives, heroism is less concrete. It varies from person to person, and it even varies within a person. Perhaps there were times when Marion viewed herself as heroic and other times when she did not.
Edwina Moor, shifting from “rivalry” to gratitude on her deathbed, might have experienced the same.
The stories of my grandfather and Marion Pritchard are more dissimilar than not. They are both stories of persistence and survival, but the commonalities exist in the general sense. The specifics are divergent.
There are, however, two things that my grandfather and Marion Pritchard might have in common. The second is definite, while the first is not.
My grandfather may have killed a Nazi.
I have pressed him for details on this, but it’s something he doesn’t want to discuss. The story has been confirmed up until a point.
In 1945, my grandfather Monek, his cousin Stanley, and their friend Henry were selected to participate in a rehabilitative program for orphans of the war organized by The Swiss Red Cross.
They boarded a train in Germany bound for Switzerland.
The train made a stop. On the opposite track was a train filled with Nazi prisoners of war, including SS officers, being escorted by Allied troops.
Monek recalls that the officers were allowed to step onto the platform for some air. They lit cigarettes and casually chatted.
Monek was enraged by the sight of his persecutors. In a version he only told me twice, he grabbed a knife “from one of their belts” — I’m not sure if he meant the SS or the Allied troops — but his friend stopped him before he could do anything violent.
Once, however, I heard him tell this story differently to a group of high school students. During the Q&A session, a young man asked him if he saw any Nazis after the war. Monek prefaced his answer with, “I usually don’t tell this. . .”
He recounted the first part of the story, then arrived at the climax.
“I walked over,” he said, his tone steady and serious, “and I grabbed a knife from one of their belts. I took it, and I killed him.”
He nodded in silence, his eyes falling to the floor.
The students collectively gasped, a sound that snapped him back to attention.
His face went flush and he stammered.
“No, no,” he said, “I didn’t do that. I hurt him, that’s all.”
Whether he hurt or killed the officer, it was different than the version I’d heard, where one of Monek’s friends stopped him before he could cause any harm.
I’ve questioned my grandfather about the differing accounts, and he insists the latter is true, that he didn’t hurt anyone. I’ve often wondered why, if he did murder the SS officer, he omits this story from his narrative. Most people would not begrudge a survivor killing a Nazi.
Perhaps it’s because it was an act of uncontrolled rage, rather than an act of necessary violence like Marion’s killing of the Dutch collaborator. My grandfather is a person ruled by emotion instead of reason, and his impulsivity is still dominant at 91-years-old.
There’s another story he doesn’t tell, mainly because it’s not central to his tale of survival, but also because it upsets him.
In postwar Switzerland, Monek learned how to ride a bicycle. He found it great fun but admits he was reckless. One day, he was speeding down a steep road and didn’t brake before an intersection.
His bike collided with a young girl. She was badly injured and went into a coma.
Monek visited her every day, and he recalls that her family was surprisingly kind to him and understanding. After a few days, she emerged from the coma and recovered.
I believe the reason he doesn’t tell either of these stories is because both bring him shame. The death of the SS officer and the injury of the little girl were both the result of his own loss of control.
Despite his nature, my grandfather is a person who at all times has sought to project the image of control: in business, with his family, and of himself. Even as the weaknesses of old age and terminal illness wear on him, he insists that he is fine, that he is in control.
Fighting back against the inevitability of terminal cancer is his final attempt at heroism, like the mythical heroes who wage war against Death itself.
In reality, it’s unchecked emotion, plus a refusal to acknowledge his loss of control. Both create chaos for himself and those around him. Witnessing it, I empathize, but I also recognize it’s anything but heroic.
Edwina Moor and the other parents who sent their children into hiding recognized their stark situations and didn’t fight the impossible.
Sometimes the bravest course of action is to accept the hand dealt by fate.
The second similarity between my grandfather and Marion is their willingness to share their stories.
Once Marion and her husband Tony moved to America, they ceaselessly recounted their experiences. After two weeks, Tony’s family and friends told the couple they didn’t want to hear anymore about the war or displaced persons’ camps.
“I didn’t get tired of talking about it,” Marion says in her testimony, “the people who were listening to us got tired of hearing us talk about it.”
Marion ceased her discussion of the past. She focused on her life and family, raising three sons while working as a child social worker and later as a psychoanalyst. In 1982, she was formally invited to talk about her experiences for the first time.
“I’ve been talking ever since,” she says.
Marion told her story countless times, many of them recorded on film, and she also used her position to elevate the stories of others.
When receiving the Raoul Wallenberg Medal in 1996, Marion delivered a lecture about the unrecognized work of Jewish heroes and resistors during the war. She criticized Yad Vashem for only honoring non-Jewish rescuers, then she spent her entire address elevating the stories of Jewish ones, an action she said helps combat the misperception that Jews “went like lambs to the slaughter.”
There’s something heroic about stepping away from the spotlight and shining it on those less recognized.
My grandfather came to the United States in 1947. He learned English and first told his story publicly in the 1950s, a time when the wounds of the war were fresh and most people, like Tony Pritchard’s family, didn’t want to hear about it.
That didn’t stop my grandfather from sharing. He recognized early on that many Americans had minimal understanding of what happened “over there” in Europe. Some were already saying that accounts of the horrors were exaggerations.
Like Marion, my grandfather has been talking about it ever since.
There has been no instance, not even in his moments of illest health, that he refused a request to relate his experiences.
As he recovered from heart surgery, laid out on a hospital bed, a nurse went to check his IV line and paused at the sight of the tattooed number on his arm.
“You want to know what that is?” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’ll tell you.”
Like my grandfather’s, Marion’s story is one I’ve committed to memory, not just by writing about it, but by telling it to anyone who will listen, family and friends.
It’s in the same spirit of remembrance that I shared my grandfather’s story and now Marion’s with you.
I’m grateful to Marion’s granddaughter, Margaret Pritchard Houston, for being the first to tell me about her grandmother.
We carry the narratives of others, remembering and conveying them into the future.
It’s not just your story or mine. It’s our story.
This is the second part of the #OurStory series, which aims to share diverse narratives of struggle, resistance, and survival.
Follow Margaret Pritchard Houston on Twitter:
Marion Pritchard’s complete testimony for The Shoah Foundation, recorded in 1998:
