01/05/2026
She was 19 when she saw N**i soldiers throw children into trucks by their pigtails. That morning, she stopped being a student and became a rescuer.
Amsterdam, 1942. A beautiful spring morning.
Marion van Binsbergen was riding her bicycle to class, following a route she'd taken since childhood. The street was familiar. The neighborhood was home.
Then she turned a corner and saw something that would change her forever.
N**i soldiers were liquidating a Jewish children's home. Children ages 2 to 8 were being loaded into trucks. Not carefully. Not gently.
"You see little kids picked up by their pigtails or by a leg and thrown over the side of a truck," Marion would later recall. "You stop but you can't believe it."
She was 19 years old. A social work student. The daughter of a judge who had taught her about justice and moral resolve. She'd opposed the N**i occupation since it began in 1940, but this was different.
This was the moment she chose action.
"I knew my rescue work was more important than anything else I might be doing," she said.
For the next three years, Marion van Binsbergen became someone else entirely. Someone who lied. Someone who stole. Someone who forged documents and arranged illegal foster placements and hid refugees in secret rooms.
Someone who would eventually kill to protect the people she was hiding.
She started with what she knew. As a social work student, she understood how to assess families, how to prepare people for difficult situations. She used those skills to find non-Jewish families willing to take in Jewish children illegally. She trained them. She prepared them for the risks.
She forged identification papers. She created false family histories. She performed what was known as the "mission of disgrace"—falsely registering herself as an u***d mother of newborn babies to conceal their Jewish identity. In a society where u***d motherhood meant shame, Marion took on that shame repeatedly to save children.
She worked with friends in the Dutch Resistance, part of a network of people who had decided that saving lives mattered more than safety, more than law, more than the rules they'd been raised to follow.
Then she took on an assignment that would last nearly three years.
A Jewish man named Anton P***k was in hiding with his three young children. They needed someone to live with them, to help care for the children, to maintain the appearance of normalcy. Marion moved into a country house to become their protector.
For almost three years, that house was their entire world.
The family had a hiding place—a pit dug beneath the floor, concealed and dark. Whenever they heard a vehicle approaching at night, all five of them would climb into that pit and wait. Sometimes for minutes. Sometimes for hours.
The N**is conducted raids constantly, searching houses, looking for hidden Jews.
One night, the N**is came. Marion and the P***k family climbed into the pit. They held their breath. They listened to boots walking overhead, furniture being moved, doors being opened.
Eventually, the N**is left. They'd found nothing.
Marion and the family climbed out of the pit. The children were exhausted. They'd been hiding for hours.
Thirty minutes later, someone knocked on the door.
A Dutch collaborator had come back. He'd suspected the house might be hiding Jews. He'd waited for the N**is to leave, then returned alone to catch the family when their guard was down.
The children were already out of the pit. There was no time to hide them. He saw them. He knew what they were.
Marion understood what would happen next. This man would report them to the N**is. The children would be taken. Anton would be taken. They would be sent to camps. They would die.
She had a gun. She'd kept it in case of emergency.
This was the emergency.
She shot him. She killed him.
"I would do it again, under the same circumstances," she would say decades later. "But it still bothers me."
That's what resistance cost. That's what saving 150 lives required.
By the end of the war in 1945, Marion had done things she never imagined she would do. In a 1996 lecture, she laid it out plainly:
"Most of us were brought up to tell truth, to obey the secular law and the Ten Commandments. By 1945, I had lied, stolen, cheated, deceived and even killed."
She'd violated every principle she'd been raised with. She'd broken every rule. She'd become someone her 19-year-old self wouldn't have recognized.
And she'd saved 150 Jewish children.
After the war, Marion worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in displaced-persons camps in Germany, helping survivors rebuild their shattered lives. There, she met Anton Pritchard, a U.S. Army officer running a camp in Bavaria.
They married in 1947 and moved to the United States, eventually settling in Vermont. She worked as a psychoanalyst and helped refugee families settle in America. She continued the work she'd started during the war—helping people who had nowhere else to go.
In 1981, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem named her one of the Righteous Among the Nations—the highest honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
But Marion's rescue work didn't end with the war or even with her lifetime.
She taught an annual seminar at Clark University in Massachusetts, telling students her story, showing them what moral courage actually looks like in practice. Not theoretical. Not abstract. But real—with all its complexity, all its compromises, all its costs.
Professor Deborah Dwork, a Holocaust historian at Clark, watched Marion's influence ripple through generations of students:
"Some of our students chose their professions referencing Marion. 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."
Think about that. Marion saved 150 people during the war. Then she inspired students who went on to save others. Who trained others to save others. The rescue work she started in 1942 is still continuing.
When Marion Pritchard died in December 2016 at age 96, she'd lived long enough to see the children she saved grow old. To meet their children and grandchildren. To know that her choice that spring morning in 1942 had created entire family trees that otherwise wouldn't exist.
She'd also lived long enough to grapple with what it cost.
She never pretended it was simple. She never claimed it was easy. She openly acknowledged that she'd broken moral codes, violated principles, killed another human being.
But she also never regretted the choice. Because the alternative—watching children be thrown into trucks and doing nothing—was impossible.
Marion Pritchard was 19 years old when she saw children being treated as disposable objects. That morning, she made a decision: this was more important than anything else she might be doing.
For the next 74 years, she lived that decision.
She lied to N**is. She forged documents. She hid refugees. She killed a man who would have turned in children. She violated every rule she'd been taught—because the rules themselves had become evil.
And 150 people lived because of it. Thousands of their descendants exist because of it. Students who never met the people she saved are now saving others because of her example.
That's not just heroism. That's a lifetime of refusing to be a bystander. That's choosing action over safety, principle over law, conscience over comfort.
Marion was raised to follow the Ten Commandments. By 1945, she'd broken several of them.
But she'd also saved 150 children from being murdered.
She understood the moral complexity. She lived with it for 71 years after the war ended. She taught it to students so they would understand that real moral courage often requires doing things that aren't simple or clean.
Sometimes saving lives means breaking rules. Sometimes justice requires breaking laws. Sometimes doing the right thing means becoming someone you never wanted to be.
Marion van Binsbergen became Marion Pritchard. The student became a rescuer. The daughter of a judge became someone who killed to protect the innocent.
And 150 people lived to tell their children: there was a woman who risked everything to save us.
