A Most Unwanted Man

Imagine getting fatally shot while in someone's home and no one tries to find where you are when you obviously stop showing up where you might have next gone?

Okay, it was wartime, but the story of Marion Pritchard plugging a Dutch Nazi as the guy was about to round up the Jewish kids who had just come out of hiding and send them off to concentration camps, is a tale of situational bravery, as well as someone being so thoroughly disliked that no one even solved the case of where the missing Dutch Nazi might have gone,

Ms. Pritchard has now passed away at 96, described as a "wartime rescuer of Jews." The writer of Ms. Pritchard's obituary is Richard Sandomir, a new byline to the obits page, but a very seasoned reporter, who would usually be telling us about sports and the media. My guess is the layoffs and the buyouts at the Times have caused Mr. Sandomir to move to another desk. No matter, it's a great obit, and one of the few you'll read of someone who is 96 and not memorialized by Robert McFadden.

Ms. Pritchard was a Dutch gentile who aided in hiding Jewish families from the Nazi searches for Jews to ship to the camps. She was 22 at the time and she was already helping families evade capture. She was a Girl Guide, which I will take to being close to a Boy Scout, who was certainly earning her merit badges.

Apparently, in one instance in 1942, a Dutch Nazi, a civilian collaborator who was a former Dutch police officer, came back fairly quickly after finding nothing when he visited a home outside of Amsterdam earlier with three Nazi soldiers. There was a hoped for element of surprise when the families would have abandoned their hiding place, feeling safe, having evaded the previous search.

Well, the element of surprise was totally his, because Ms. Pritchard reached for a revolver and killed the guy. A local undertaker and no lover of Nazis, helped bury the guy in a coffin with another corpse. You have to consider the pallbearers and grave diggers were in on the deception because two bodies in one casket had to weigh a bit extra.

Turns out, she got away with it. Apparently, the former policeman was not well liked, perhaps being a 1940s version of a human from a "basket of deplorables."  No one seemed to miss the bum, and nothing came of his sudden disappearance from the face of the earth. Ms. Pritchard went on to a lifetime of social work and later became a psychoanalyst. The stuff of movies. Talk about a two-fer

Oddly enough, when the NYT obituary editor William McDonald filed his year-end wrap up of the year in obituaries, he mentions Ms. Pritchard, and as he looks to place her actions in the perspective of creating a legacy, he only mentions that she shot a Nazi "stooge," leaving out the part about fatally shooting a Nazi sympathizer. Coming from Mr. McDonald, this seems careless.

We know what Mark Twain said: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter; 'tis the difference between the lighting bug and the lightning. And Ms. Pritchard certainly held the lightning in her hand.

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