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00:03:41
And welcome. To My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hardstark. That's Karen Kilgariff.
00:03:45
And we're here podcasting for you with full hearts and can't lose. And golden. And living our lives like it's golden.
00:03:53
And we're golden. And we are doing it. Okay, we have to talk about this. Are you sick?
00:04:00
Because. Oh. Oh. We have to talk about. We went to Austin over the weekend for South by Southwest for the iHeart Podcast Awards.
00:04:09
So much fun every year. Yeah. I get on the plane. I'm sitting right behind, directly behind Karen.
00:04:15
And directly next to Karen, so I can see this person through the arm chair rest thing.
00:04:22
This fucking dude, tell them about him. Well, this dude was very proud because he had a kerchief that he liked to blow his nose in.
00:04:31
And he started about three minutes before the plane took off. I felt like I was interpreting maybe some nervousness about the flight.
00:04:40
Maybe some tension. Maybe some fucking, like, bubonic plague. Well, so he pulls this kerchief out of his pocket.
00:04:47
Green handkerchief. I'll never forget it. Gigantic. And he blows his nose like he's doing a bit.
00:04:52
Like it's like a I'm an elephant kind of trumpeting thing. Which, you know, like I blow my nose constantly.
00:04:59
So I'm not going to be like a shamey person. I don't I try not to do that in public public.
00:05:05
No. And especially like this idea of like, well, someone has their own. I keep saying kerchief.
00:05:10
What's the right? Handkerchief. Handkerchief. Yeah. Except for that this man, then after he blew it.
00:05:16
Into this already wet, damp, gigantic green handkerchief. But then he snaps it out like a goddamn picnic blanket.
00:05:25
I am not exaggerating when I tell you he blows his nose in it and then snaps it out like three times.
00:05:32
Every 60 seconds. It started weird. I almost said something like on the fourth time.
00:05:37
By the 15th time, I was literally like screaming and putting my sweater over my mouth every time he did it
00:05:44
Here's the biggest problem. Don't be sick on a plane And if you're if you are at least try to pretend you're not like don't get on a plane
00:05:52
If you have to blow your nose because you so sick every minute if I may i gonna argue with that I don think that what it was I think he had a truly sick perversion to like getting snot on people or something because it was so nonsensically
00:06:09
When have you ever seen someone blow their nose and then snap out the handkerchief?
00:06:13
Snap it out. That reminds me of like there was a time where I kept walking at nice restaurants, kept walking into a man who forgot to lock the door standing at the urinal.
00:06:23
And I was like, why does that keep happening to me? And someone was like, that's a fetish is having someone walking on you peeing. And I was like, OK, it's not just this weird.
00:06:32
Right. You know, and it was always like not that nice restaurants matter, but it was a places where like it wasn't a gas station where you're like you've been driving for six hours.
00:06:40
The lock broken. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, and also in this situation, it's very easy and jokey to be like it's a fetish, but nothing else explains the amount of times he did it, the drama with which he snapped it out, where it was just like, I can't believe the people across the aisle are pissed.
00:06:57
It was so bad that I did something I never do on flights. I made friends with a person sitting next to me.
00:07:04
I had to turn and start talking to her or I was going to fucking scream. Yeah. And she ended up being this lovely woman with South Asia who lives in my fucking neighborhood.
00:07:13
So funny. And we chatted the whole time. I'm sure that was super annoying, too, because I hate when people—
00:07:17
Oh, no, I didn't hear you. I didn't hear you making a friend. I was up in the front getting stuff on my shoulder from this man.
00:07:24
I can't believe you're not sick. And I don't think I am. Although I'm today in Los Angeles, fun weather talk.
00:07:30
It's so hot. It's hot. That I kind of feel sick from how is it this hot? Yeah. And I wore a really kind of, I didn't think it through summer shirt on.
00:07:40
And then when I got to work, I was like, I don't want to wear this on. Camera? On camera, on video.
00:07:45
On video on Netflix. Big concern these days, listeners, with a whole other thing that's happening while you listen.
00:07:52
We've got all these other things to worry about. It's just like life keeps happening, even though it's happening.
00:07:58
Even though me and my 55-year-old face aren't that into it. Also, what is wrong with my hair?
00:08:04
What are you talking about? It's always a weird triangle. Well, anyway, thanks to iHeart.
00:08:11
We really love being partners with iHeart as a company. The people that work there are so cool.
00:08:16
We were so excited to be at that awards show. I texted Nora. I was like, hey, your favorite podcast won podcast of the year because she loves Giggly Squad.
00:08:23
Yeah. My God, they were the fucking most hilarious women I've ever— So good. They were so charming and lovely.
00:08:29
We don't have to worry about the future. They're going to kill it in every direction.
00:08:33
That's right. They were so hilarious. We can retire. But yeah, we got to see lots of people that we like there and hang out.
00:08:38
Watch what crappens. Always a pleasure. So it was super fun. Fun all around. We lost, but we were just happy to be there.
00:08:45
We're used to losing. We're so used to losing. That's our comfort zone. I think I really get uncomfortable when the winning starts.
00:08:50
I mean, we already won at life. So we won like posted up on a couch in at these awards.
00:08:57
Hanging out. Saying hi. Like Jake from Disgraceland on one side. Craig Peralt on the other.
00:09:03
Craig Peralt on the other. What more does anyone want? What more? In this life. Oh, we got to see the head and the heart play live like in front of 50 people or something.
00:09:12
It was great. Thank you. Thank you all. No chicken shit bingo this year, but you can't win it all.
00:09:18
But a lot because, again, to talk about the weather, the weather was so wildly up and down there that I did a lot of shopping.
00:09:27
And I just want to shout out Feathers, the vintage store in Austin. Because I bought jewelry there.
00:09:33
I bought a coat there. I bought a short-sleeved shirt there. I did it every season.
00:09:38
I haven't unpacked yet. So I forgot that I bought a shirt at a vintage store. Yes.
00:09:41
It's that gross that I haven't unpacked yet. Well, no, it's such a pain. It's like you just come back and get right back into everything.
00:09:48
Yeah. I think the woman at Feathers actually, because she gave me two like tote bags with their logo on it.
00:09:53
Nice. I think one's for you. Love a tote bag. Yeah. We should count tote bags one day as like a fan cult video.
00:09:59
I've got them to count for sure. Yeah. I've got a whole drawer full. They'll have funny ironic sayings on them.
00:10:04
Cities we visited. Our own merch. I just got a Gelson's tote. Oh. Because you know how everybody's into those Trader Joe's totes.
00:10:12
Oh, right. Around the world. Yeah. Well, Gelson's in the game now. Get in there, Gelson.
00:10:16
Kielsen's our local rich people's grocery store. They're like, we can do this. Speaking of we can do this, we have a podcast network.
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That's right. It's called Exactly Right Media. Here are some quick highlights. Okay, this is very exciting.
00:10:29
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00:10:42
It's so good. Speaking of incredibly exciting over on That's Messed Up, Kara and Lisa recap the SVU episode, Reasonable Doubt, about No Doubt.
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And they sit down with the—no, that's not true. And they sit down with—get ready for this because my jaw dropped when I heard about this.
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Their guest is the great Bradley Whitford. I mean, what a booking. Wow. Hello. Wow. Kara and Lisa killing it.
00:11:06
So great. Did you see the Death by Lightning, the new Netflix series about the presidential assassination?
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He's in it and he's so good. He's so good. And this week on Buried Bones, Kate and Paul head to Boston in 1886 where the owner of a laundromat is found murdered in his shop.
00:11:23
A laundromat in 1886. I know. I was just thinking about that. A laundry vat. As investigators learn more about the victim's ambitions, a clearer picture of the case begins to emerge.
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Dun, dun, dun. And that should be at the end of every one of their paragraphs. Yeah, true.
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And on Do You Need a Ride? Chris and Karen welcome Francesca Fiorentini. And they talk about Olympic tears, serious skincare, and more.
00:11:47
Yeah, that was a fun episode. And by the by over in our merch corner the spring cleaning sale runs from March 26th to March 29th You can get 20 off site If you have been waiting to grab any kind of a merch this is your moment Any kind of a merch So yeah go to exactlyrightstore and use promo code ERMSpring26 Write that down
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That's stitchfix.com slash murder. Goodbye. If you're always on the lookout for a great audiobook or just want help figuring out what to listen to next, there's a podcast you should know about.
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00:16:10
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00:16:27
Goodbye. All right. Okay, I'm going to kick us off today. I'd never heard of this story before. It's kind of crazy and kind of relevant. I actually just saw a trailer. Zach Galifianakis has a new show out. Have you seen the trailer for it? It's him and the whole thing's about gardening and growing food and basically how we need to learn how to grow our own food again.
00:16:55
How can he stop being perfect? The greatest hippie in the world? Yeah. Love this man.
00:17:00
But it's like truly something that he's very passionate about. And like he's basically teaching people how to do that.
00:17:06
I need that. I love that. That's kind of a perfect little side plug. Zach is my friend and I adore him and his work.
00:17:14
But something to think about as I tell you this story that begins in 1940s, Oregon, at the Oregon State Hospital in the capital city of Salem.
00:17:23
This is the state's oldest running psychiatric institution. It was first opened in the 1880s, and it's still operating today.
00:17:29
The original building has been, I put remodeled, but it's like completely redone.
00:17:34
But the original campus is where they filmed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the 70s.
00:17:39
I hear you. So author Diane Garris Gardner wrote a book about the hospital, and she's quoted as saying,
00:17:45
quote, the history of the Oregon State Hospital is inevitably the history of the mental health system itself, end quote.
00:17:52
And like psychiatric institutions across America that history includes decades of harmful practices based on outdated thinking like forced sterilizations and of course lobotomies a horrifying thing that happened and that everyone still has to deal with alongside the systemic harm caused by chronic underfunding and overcrowding of mental health facilities
00:18:16
So our story begins here on the afternoon of November 18th, 1942. It's just after five o'clock.
00:18:23
Hundreds of patients and staff are eating or have just eaten their hospital-issued dinner when slowly, one by one, they begin to display classic signs of poisoning.
00:18:34
Some collapse. Others vomit. Many struggle to breathe. Within hours, dozens of people are dead, and officials have no idea who or what is to blame.
00:18:44
Oh, my God. This is the story of the 1942 Oregon State Hospital poisoning tragedy.
00:18:48
Fuck. I've never heard of this. Right? Me either. Tessa, our AP, is the one who suggested it.
00:18:53
No way. Yeah. So the main sources used today are the book Inside Oregon State Hospital, A History of Triumph and Tragedy by Diane Garris Gardner, and reporting by Cappy Lynn for the Statesman Journal.
00:19:06
Cappy. Cappy's cute. That's a great name. With a K? K-A-P-P-Y? It's actually C-A-P-I.
00:19:12
Oh, that's cute. But C-A-P-P-Y is also good. Kitty. Cappy. And the rest of the sources in our show notes.
00:19:19
So a mass poisoning has been carried out and investigators need to know why. At the time, tensions in the United States could not be higher.
00:19:27
Pearl Harbor was the year before, December 1941, and that actually ended up pulling us into World War II.
00:19:34
Wartime austerity measures now touch every aspect of American life as the country funnels its resources overseas and trade routes are disrupted.
00:19:43
Americans are forced to cut back on everything in their lives from shoes to paper to tires.
00:19:48
To smiling. right just everything hershey bars that's the one that always gets me in world war ii movies when
00:19:54
they're like look a hershey bar yeah a chocolate bar that reminds me of atonement and it makes me
00:19:59
sad oh i just re-watched that so good even but that part where they're on the beach and just
00:20:05
waiting to get rescued insane okay okay so over here while that's going on our boys are sacrificing
00:20:10
their lives at home americans feel all this austerity the most at the grocery store because
00:20:16
food rationing means that every household has to be very careful when it comes to grocery shopping.
00:20:22
And since Pearl Harbor, there's increased anxiety that there will be further attacks on U.S. soil,
00:20:27
especially in the coastal states, because Japanese subs are being seen in the Pacific,
00:20:33
German U-boats are being seen in the Atlantic. Imagine how fucking terrifying. I mean, it was real, real.
00:20:39
Yeah, yeah. There's even concern that the already strained U.S. food supply could be targeted by the enemy.
00:20:44
The government urges Americans to start growing crops in their backyards and in community gardens, calling them, quote, victory gardens, which is very smart and true to counteract all the fear and scarcity around food.
00:20:57
So with that in context, November 18th, 1942 at the Oregon State Hospital is just a regular Wednesday.
00:21:03
Aside from all of that, about 30 people work in the kitchen as dinner is prepared for patients and staff.
00:21:09
And 30 might sound like a lot until you realize the cooking staff prepares three meals a day for around 3,000 people.
00:21:17
So it's huge, huge numbers. But just like every other department at this hospital, the kitchen's also going through a staffing crisis because of the war.
00:21:26
So they are understaffed and overworked as well. And this is how bad it is. Of the 30 kitchen workers, only three of them are actually employed as cooks.
00:21:36
We're not sure if there are other staffers in the mix, but the vast majority of the kitchen staff seem to be patients who are called trustees.
00:21:45
Trustees don't actually cook the food, but the hospital relies on them for things like washing the dishes and tidying up, and they are not paid for their labor.
00:21:53
So they're like patient interns. A combination of inadequate state funding, overcrowding, and wartime rations dictates the menu every day.
00:22:02
So at this dinner tonight, the main dish is scrambled eggs. So it's kind of horrible.
00:22:09
I'm just going to ask you if you thought like the food still tasted better back then than it does today.
00:22:14
But I don't want scrambled eggs in any fucking time period. That's disgusting. I hate scrambled eggs.
00:22:20
Not even if they're nice and loose and runny? Oh. Well, I can answer because I think this is a thing we don't think about as much these days,
00:22:29
except for unless you're on food stamps or, you know, your family has to rely on powdered food.
00:22:35
But these eggs are frozen yolks made with powdered milk. So I'm not thinking it's a delicious morning, you know, start to your day.
00:22:44
I can't imagine. Is that what you said for dinner, though? It's dinner. We had breakfast for dinner a lot as kids because that was just easy and affordable.
00:22:52
And I didn't realize I was so excited that we're getting. Day is night. Night is day.
00:22:57
So exciting. We're flipping it all around. I know my dad would make us breakfast and dinner pancakes.
00:23:02
As long as he put little faces inside, we didn't care what was happening. Okay, so scrambled eggs is basically considered decent sustenance, considering that seven cents, which is about $1.50 in today's money, is all the hospital is able to allocate to feed each patient.
00:23:19
Per day? Yeah. Holy shit. Oregon State Hospital is enrolled in the federal program that supplies the kitchen with frozen egg yolks.
00:23:27
And according to the book Inside Oregon State Hospital, quote, without the subsidy, the patients would only be given one egg a week and no meat at all, end quote.
00:23:36
Wow. So the rationing is very serious. The hospital's latest shipment of eggs came a few months back in February.
00:23:42
It contained 6,700 pounds of frozen yolks divided into two-gallon containers. I didn't know you could freeze yolks.
00:23:49
I don't like it. Do you think they look like little ice cubes with yellow circles?
00:23:54
Aw. That's cute. With some orange juice. Cocktail, nice cocktail. The thing is, and I did, I'm going to say this as a person who grew up in the egg basket of the world at one time, Petaluma, California.
00:24:07
We're all about the eggs there. Yeah. I just don't really love interacting with eggs.
00:24:12
No. In most ways. I know what you mean. Yeah. You said it yourself, but I'm going to jump right on that bandwagon and pin it back to my hometown.
00:24:20
Okay. So these frozen yolks are stored in the basement in storage rooms with the rest of the hospital's food supply.
00:24:27
This night, dinner served at 5 o'clock. as usual. It's delivered to rooms and in the dining areas across several wards. They're far
00:24:35
apart from each other, but connected by a tunnel system. But as soon as people start eating their
00:24:40
dinner, it's clear something is wrong. These eggs taste funny, and some will describe them as salty.
00:24:46
Other people will describe them as soapy. You know, I think I've had food poisoning twice.
00:24:52
The taste that I always tasted was metal. Really? Have you ever had that? No, like what kind of food
00:24:58
Was it like one one time it was a Chinese chicken salad? And it was like like a penny?
00:25:04
Yes. It was like there was weird metal in there, but it's not like tangy. Yeah. But it was like someone poured a LaCroix across my Chinese chicken salad in that way.
00:25:15
Where it's like that doesn't belong. Yeah. That's not a food taste. Yeah. And then count down.
00:25:21
Count it down. So in one section of the hospital, a nurse named Ali Wassell is so uneasy about the taste.
00:25:27
She orders all of her patients to stop eating these eggs, everybody in the ward.
00:25:32
Even still, many people do eat the eggs, even just a bite or two. And then within minutes, they begin complaining of leg cramps and nausea that are intensifying as each second passes.
00:25:43
Leg cramps. Leg cramps. That's scary. I've got egg leg cramps. Like food poisoning that goes to like places that aren't your gut or your system.
00:25:53
Yeah. It's like your fucking leg. Yeah, that's like in the blood. Yeah. Ew. Okay.
00:25:59
Egg hands. I have pain. Some start vomiting blood and others stop breathing and their faces turn blue.
00:26:06
Holy shit. Within an hour of dinner being served, one person is dead. When doctors and nurses show up to help, they're immediately overwhelmed by the massive number of people, and that number is in the hundreds, needing immediate treatment.
00:26:21
So it's just like everybody in the room. The smell. The smell. Of scrambled egg vomit.
00:26:26
The screams. Sorry, everyone. I'm trying to make this. I'm trying to really like build a picture.
00:26:31
Yes. Build a world. This is what we do on this show. Right. We world build with words.
00:26:35
Powdered scrambled egg vomit. Sorry. We're going to call this the brunch episode.
00:26:43
Okay. Okay, go. Five hours later, 10 people are dead. Yep. By four the next morning, 40 staff members and or patients have died.
00:26:53
Oh, my God. By Thursday evening, the death toll hits 47. Nurse Ali Wassell's ward is the only one with no victims.
00:27:01
She actually ends up getting sick from the one bite of eggs she took when she then was like, forks down.
00:27:08
But she does recover. The hospital morgue is small. It can only hold a few bodies at a time.
00:27:13
So victims have to be laid out in hallways and in the on-site chapel until outside mortuaries from around the entire state come and take the bodies away.
00:27:23
So based on the symptoms, it's immediately suspected to be a mass poisoning. Fear washes over an already anxious public as newspapers begin reporting on this tragedy.
00:27:33
Toxicologists test both the victim's stomach contents and these eggs themselves.
00:27:37
But the frozen yolks were distributed by the federal government itself as a part of a wartime food subsidy program and sent to institutions all throughout Oregon and across the country.
00:27:49
So the genuine fear that these eggs have been deliberately poisoned by enemies of the United States to terrorize Americans begins to take hold.
00:27:57
Right. Like it looks like either they're trying to make it look like the government's poisoning their own people or whatever.
00:28:03
So before more harm can be done, Oregon's governor orders all Oregon-based beneficiaries of this federal subsidy program to stop using frozen yolks immediately.
00:28:13
The federal people are like, I can't please just one bite. I love them so much. What will I have for dinner?
00:28:19
What will I have for my noontime snack? The federal government then makes a similar order and starts testing its surplus eggs for toxins or poison.
00:28:27
Meanwhile, scientists from the Army, the FDA, and the American Medical Association are dispatched to Salem, Oregon to assist local pathologists in its investigation.
00:28:38
And all of this happens within about a day of the tragedy taking place. So immediately people are flying in.
00:28:45
Of people to die overnight from food poisoning. And it is. What an opening scene for our movie.
00:28:52
Because, holy shit, you're the doctor and the nurse flirting. Yeah. Kind of interested in each other.
00:28:58
Kind of cute. I'm not sure. Walking, talking. Yeah. Hey, what do you think of the top 20 hits of the 1940s?
00:29:05
How about this war? Come around a corner. This is the plot of the movie Airplane that you're talking about.
00:29:11
And I love that movie. Unfunny Airplane, but same amount of eggs. Okay. The scientists quickly confirm the eggs were laced with a huge amount of sodium fluoride, which is lethal to humans, even in small doses.
00:29:26
Oh, I thought they were just bad. They were fucking laced. Laced shit. And basically, sodium fluoride is rat poison and roach poison.
00:29:35
Of course, like a state-run hospital like that has plenty of rat and roach poison on hand.
00:29:40
so the investigators also determined the eggs were contaminated during the cooking process
00:29:45
meaning any other program using the same government subsidized egg yolks can rest easy
00:29:51
because theirs are fine okay drink away defrost and drink away friends so the mystery is now centered squarely inside the Oregon State Hospital kitchen and investigators want to know how and why this poison got cooked into a scrambled egg dinner
00:30:08
Somebody's just like, don't serve people this food. Every member of the kitchen crew is interviewed, but investigators don't get anywhere.
00:30:15
None of the kitchen staff admits to knowing anything, and investigators worry that the trustees' testimonies are complicated by the fact that there are also psychiatric patients.
00:30:24
Of course. But then five days after the poisoning, a 64-year-old assistant cook named Abraham McKillop cracks.
00:30:31
He reveals that— Is that a pun on purpose? Oh. Oh, I didn't even think about that.
00:30:36
Wow. That's good. I mean, bad to me. Cracks pokes his little beak out of the shell.
00:30:43
Cracks like an egg. He reveals that on the night of the poisoning, he was prepping the scrambled eggs,
00:30:49
and he realized that he needed powdered milk for the recipe. but he was so busy he couldn't step away from the line and go get it for himself.
00:30:56
So he asked one of the patient trustees, a 27-year-old named George Nozen, to go downstairs and grab the powdered milk for him.
00:31:04
And then Abraham gave the patient his key to the storage rooms downstairs. This was a break in protocol.
00:31:11
Employees are forbidden from giving patients their hospital keys. But George Nozen was a very trusted trustee in the kitchen and Abraham needed a hand.
00:31:21
So they're understaffed, three cooks. And also George had been down to the basement food storage area before.
00:31:28
So this was something he had done and was used to doing. So he could be trusted to do it.
00:31:32
But here's the problem. What George did not know was that there were two food storage rooms in the basement, both open with the same key.
00:31:42
One said poison on it and one said food on it. Poison, food, food. I mean, this is one of the worst and saddest crazy mix-up stories.
00:31:54
So he didn't purposely kill a bunch of people? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So when he went down to get the powdered milk, he unknowingly went into the wrong room, which is such a mindfuck.
00:32:05
Like this idea that without your knowing, there's a whole second room that you could have gone into.
00:32:10
Yeah, but even then it's like, it should say fucking poison on it. Fuck, it should say fucking poison.
00:32:16
Right? It should say fucking poison. Yes, you're exactly right. And keep that, bookmark that idea for later.
00:32:26
When George looked around in that second room that he thought was the first room for the powdered milk,
00:32:32
he thought he found it in this big unlabeled vat sitting right next to all the other food.
00:32:37
It was white. It was odorless power. He scooped out several pounds of it as requested.
00:32:42
You said power instead of powder. Did I really? it's almost over for me and thank you for everything it's been nice
00:32:49
it was white odorless powder sorry no because i don't want to say white power for fuck's sake god uh okay i mean you say it all the
00:33:02
time no don't tell me that uh it was white odorless powder and he scooped out several
00:33:08
pounds of it as requested and then headed back upstairs, handed it over to Abraham,
00:33:14
and around six pounds of that poison was mixed into the eggs. State police would later say that
00:33:21
just two pounds of this powdered sodium fluoride would be enough to kill 2,000 people. And the fact
00:33:26
that it was so potent probably saved lives because it caused the people who ate it to immediately
00:33:31
vomit the poison up. Right. And it tasted so fucking weird. Sodium, whatever the fuck. So
00:33:37
So salty or soapy or whatever. Yeah. Jesus. To immediately be like, ugh. As opposed to, my delicious powdered milk eggs.
00:33:47
Abraham admits to the investigators that he put two and two together very quickly once diners started showing symptoms.
00:33:52
He told the hospital's head chef, Mary O'Hare. Hey, Mary. Hey, Mary. And they retraced George's steps into the basement and they figured out he mistook the white powder that was cockroach poison for powdered milk.
00:34:06
but they were too afraid to come forward right away. So both Abraham and Mary are arrested.
00:34:13
So they were right to be afraid. George is not arrested. Rumors swirled that they carried out the poisoning intentionally.
00:34:21
It was a terrorist plot of some kind. But then a grand jury investigation proves that to be a baseless rumor
00:34:27
and that considering how stretched thin all the hospital staff were, an accident like this was bound to happen.
00:34:33
Because of the staffing shortage, Oregon State Hospital has been operating without a staff dietician, and that's the person who
00:34:40
usually is in charge of storing and labeling things in the basement. So you cut costs and you cut corners.
00:34:47
That's what starts happening. So that's likely how it's possible that a gigantic vat of cockroach poison would wind
00:34:54
up sitting unlabeled next to real food. That's also unlabeled. So because of these staffing issues, it's impossible for Abraham and his colleagues
00:35:01
to do their jobs without relying heavily on the patient trustees who are not trained as actual
00:35:07
staff and were not told the detail about the second food storage room. In the end, the grand
00:35:13
jury does not bring any criminal charges against assistant cook Abraham McKillop, head chef Mary
00:35:19
O'Hare, or George Nozen, and it's easy to assume that all three of them were fully traumatized for
00:35:25
life by this entire event. For sure. In fact, the grand jury makes a very practical recommendation
00:35:31
to state lawmakers about the need for legislation requiring all poisons to be explicitly labeled.
00:35:38
So exactly what you're saying. And the grand jury takes this opportunity to issue a damning report
00:35:43
about the Oregon State Hospital itself and the impossible responsibilities of an overwhelmed
00:35:48
staff. This goes far beyond the kitchen staff and far beyond wartime staffing. It also involves
00:35:54
incredible overcrowding and consistent underfunding by lawmakers which then feeds into the staffing crisis According to the book Inside Oregon State Hospital in this era one daytime staffer cares
00:36:05
for 16 patients at a time. Think of it. Too many. Think of that as like two tops in a restaurant.
00:36:12
You have eight tables of people who need a lot of help. Totally. But at night, there's only one staffer for every 150 patients.
00:36:22
That's just general staff. There are only eight doctors for more than 2,700 total patients,
00:36:28
which means inevitably employees are going to rely on things like restraints and confinement
00:36:33
more often than if there were practical patient to caregiver ratio. Right. So it's basically this situation is worst case.
00:36:42
Expectedly, there's also a ton of employee turnover, with one stat showing, quote, 108.68% turnover in staff from 1940 to 1942 alone.
00:36:53
Oh, my God. Everybody's like, bye. Fuck this shit. This is horrible. In the wake of this horrific event, national laws are passed requiring that poisons be manufactured with clear warning labels.
00:37:04
It seems so obvious. It does. There are also noted increases in funding and staffing at American public hospitals,
00:37:11
but the poor reputation of American mental health care institutions persists. By the 1950s and into the 60s, there's a growing movement to replace institutionalization
00:37:21
with community-based mental health care, allowing patients to live more normal lives
00:37:27
while they get outpatient treatment from doctors and psychiatrists. Given all the horror stories from psychiatric hospitals,
00:37:33
this is seen as a much more humane approach that's conducive to better care. In 1963, President Kennedy actually signs the Community Mental Health Act that's geared in part to establishing these types of community mental health care centers across the U.S.
00:37:49
And that's one of the last pieces of legislation that he will sign before his assassination.
00:37:55
But in the decades to follow, and especially during the Ronald Reagan era, much of the funding meant to create these centers is slashed.
00:38:05
And Kennedy's vision is never fully realized. And it's often pointed out that Kennedy was drawn to this issue because of his sister Rosemary's devastating lobotomy, which Georgia covered in episode 259.
00:38:19
So public psychiatric care is so seriously underfunded in this country that jails and prisons have now become de facto ill-equipped, untrained and unwilling mental health providers.
00:38:31
And while policies vary from state to state, we are not in a particularly progressive era when it comes to this issue, particularly at the federal level.
00:38:40
And in fact, I would say that is a sarcastic understatement. That is it's probably about as bad as it could be.
00:38:47
Right. So just months ago, Trump's DOJ cut $88 million in grant money for mental health and substance abuse treatment services and training, which is interesting because Republicans, after every mass shooting, always say we need mental health services.
00:39:02
Talk about that all the time. And then they cut the funding. And then in mid-January 2026, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration slashed around $2 billion in grant money for these services.
00:39:16
And of course, Trump's big, beautiful bill cut federal Medicaid funding by 15 percent.
00:39:22
That's just some of the cuts to the mental health services in this country. How are we going to go to an unnecessary war if we don't have money from people who actually fucking need it?
00:39:32
It's so blatantly obvious now that I don't think it can be an argument anymore. When we just strip money out of schools, children don't get to have air conditioning or crayons.
00:39:43
Mental health facilities have no staffing. And yet here we are in a war in the Middle East that no one understands why we're there.
00:39:51
No health insurance. Children are starving. Food is more expensive than it's ever been.
00:39:56
Right. The cost of living is just constantly going up. It's beyond. And it's creating a pressure cooker for people with mental health issues as well as everybody else.
00:40:06
Yeah. You should point it at me when you said that. Oh, my God. But you're not wrong.
00:40:10
You are. I'm like, for example, I meant that was the middle of the table. That was an us hand, I swear.
00:40:17
I don't mind it. Give it to me, please. I'll take it. I'll be the spokesperson. You're like, can we please have some money?
00:40:25
Please, can we? This horrible event, the Oregon State Hospital poisoning, is a reminder of the stakes of indifference and neglect when it comes to our national health care.
00:40:35
As JFK actually said back in 1963, quote, the situation has been tolerated for too long.
00:40:41
It has troubled our national conscience, but only is a problem unpleasant to mention, easy to postpone, and despairing of a solution.
00:40:49
We can procrastinate no more. We must promote to the best of our ability and by all possible and appropriate means the mental and physical health of all our citizens.
00:41:00
End quote. And that's the story of the 1942 poisoning at Oregon State Hospital. And your mom had never talked about it or anything like that.
00:41:08
You hadn't heard about it? No. No. But I mean, I wonder if she would have learned about it, you know, just for the kinds of things that can happen if you are going into a field where they're used to having their funding cut.
00:41:20
Totally. I'm sure. I'm sure. And there's a real good picture that I think you'd like because it's basically one of the—
00:41:26
Is it me? It's you representing all mental health services. It's just that really good picture of a victory garden that they used to do posters.
00:41:36
And I think it's like, it's so timely. There it is. It's such a good picture. Right?
00:41:42
It's grow your victory garden. It counts more than ever. We need those. Yeah. We need to feed ourselves.
00:41:49
We need to feed our communities. I love that. We need to take care of each other.
00:41:54
There a really good book Is it written by Zach Galvanakis Oh yeah What does Zach Galvanakis have to do with this His gardening show Oh right It called The Lost Girls of Willowbrook You know Willowbrook State Hospital in Jersey that we talked about where Cropsey from It an old school book
00:42:10
It's a book where a girl goes to find her missing twin sister and gets committed because they think
00:42:15
it's her. It's like the 70s. And it really explains how awful the experience is in there.
00:42:21
like firsthand this girl's called the lost girls of willowbrook by ellen marie wiseman oh i want
00:42:26
to read that highly recommend it if you just like want to get in there yeah see the reality yeah
00:42:32
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00:45:50
Horrible story. Yes. Here's another one. Great. Well, this one's got a little bit of a light in a dark room kind of story.
00:45:57
We're going to do it in honor of Women's History Month. Wonderful. I'm a woman. I'm a History Month.
00:46:03
This is the story of a woman who, in her early 20s, put herself at great personal risk to save the lives of more than 150 Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Holland.
00:46:15
This is the story of Marian Pritchard. Hell yes. Let's get right into it. Let's go from fucking World War II to World War II.
00:46:23
Right into that World War II vibe. I just anytime we talk about these people, it's very exciting.
00:46:30
But it's also that kind of like we should be talking about what people did during World War II all the time because we need to know the rise up energy.
00:46:37
That's right. So the main source for this story is a three hour interview with Marion from 1998 conducted by USC Shoah Foundation.
00:46:45
And the Shoah Foundation was established by Steven Spielberg shortly after he completed Schindler's List.
00:46:50
Did you know that? It started out by collecting the testimony of Holocaust survivors, but it has expanded to testimony from survivors of events beyond World War II.
00:46:58
And the rest of the sources can be found in our show notes. So Marion Philippe van Binsbergen is born on November 7th, 1920 in Amsterdam.
00:47:08
Her mother, Grace, is English and her father, Jakob, is Dutch. He's a judge coming from a long line of judges on his family's side.
00:47:16
And so Marion has what sounds like a very happy and idyllic childhood. And as a child, Marion is oblivious to any amount of anti-Semitism that exists in the Netherlands. She's not Jewish. She doesn't really pay attention to it.
00:47:30
Although once when she's jumping rope and singing a jump rope song, her father tells
00:47:34
her to stop singing it because it's insulting to Jewish people. So they're a little bit progressive, the family.
00:47:40
But still, Marianne will find out later, decades later, that at this point in time, her father
00:47:44
does belong to a bridge club that doesn't allow Jews, which I think is pretty normal
00:47:48
for the time. So anti-Semitism is certainly around, even if Marianne isn't particularly attuned to
00:47:54
it. She does vividly remember Hitler's rise to power, which happened in Germany around
00:48:00
In the time she was in middle school, in her interview, she says, quote, the general Dutch attitude was this clown can't last.
00:48:08
Nobody thought that even if he came to power that that would last, end quote. Yeah.
00:48:13
Heard of it. Yeah. What she does notice is that after 1933, more German, Austrian and Polish children start showing up at her school
00:48:21
because their families have fled to the Netherlands. Around seventh grade, Marianne is sent to a British boarding school,
00:48:28
But her father brings her back to Amsterdam for high school because he thinks the academics in England are not rigorous enough.
00:48:34
And then she attends a very academic Dutch high school. And at school, Marianne is aware that some of her classmates are Jewish because they don't attend school on Saturday.
00:48:43
But other girls come from much more secular families. So Marianne isn't even aware of the true number of Jewish friends she has until once the Nazis occupy Holland.
00:48:53
And then Allie wrote, note to Georgia, Holland is a region within the Netherlands.
00:48:58
And Amsterdam is within this region, but there are parts of the Netherlands that are not Holland. Appreciate you.
00:49:04
I don't think we'll ever solve the mystery of Holland. Yeah. Marian says that her father belongs to what would have been considered a fairly conservative political party in the Netherlands, but in many ways her family, particularly her father, are quite progressive.
00:49:18
For example, Marian studies ballet, and at ballet school she meets several men whom she knows are gay.
00:49:25
And when Marion brings this up with her father, he tells her that everyone should be treated with respect.
00:49:31
Wow. Yeah, which is very progressive. Yeah, back then, too. By the time Marion's 14, she decides that her ambition in life is to become a psychoanalyst.
00:49:39
She has an older friend who is a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Hey, parallels.
00:49:45
And learning from her friend makes her want to study psychology. So when she's about 19 in 1940, she enrolls in a social work school in Amsterdam.
00:49:52
And she makes this conscious decision not to go to medical school, which is what she'd need to do, because by this point, the Nazis have already occupied the Netherlands.
00:50:01
And in order to enroll in med school, she would have to swear a loyalty oath to the Nazis.
00:50:07
She doesn't want to do it. So she goes to social work school instead. That's really creepy to think that that was that's how they infiltrated everything.
00:50:15
Like, what does that have to do? Why would you have to swear an oath to Nazis to go to school?
00:50:20
Because you're only going to work for the master race. Yeah. You know, like. God.
00:50:25
Yeah. Do no harm. Doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah. You know. They etched that off.
00:50:31
They're just like, more snakes. More snakes. Snakes around a pipe. Snakes around everything.
00:50:38
We love snakes. We love snakes. The Nazis had invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940, as you know, four months before Marion had started in social work school.
00:50:47
But they did not deport the Jews at the Netherlands right away. And Marianne points out in this interview that one of the reasons for this is that the Nazis wanted the help of the Dutch people.
00:50:57
And the Dutch people didn't really have deep currents of anti-Semitism yet. I mean, it was obviously there, but compared to other countries in Europe, it wasn't as hardcore.
00:51:07
And so even though there was anti-Semitism, the idea of deporting, not to mention killing, their Jewish neighbors was not really palatable to many of the Dutch.
00:51:16
So they started slower there. Around 1941, Marion believes that Dutch Jews and Jews from other countries who have fled to the Netherlands should make plans to leave or go into hiding.
00:51:27
She's noticing how bad it's getting. Her friends tell her she's crazy, that it's never going to get that bad in the Netherlands.
00:51:34
And Marion's father is convinced that it is going to get that bad. She says, quote, my father's one of the few people that read Mein Kampf from beginning to end.
00:51:43
It's awful dull reading. I tried. End quote. So meaning like he fucking saw the writing on the wall and in the book.
00:51:51
Yeah. So at this point, Marian is around 20 years old and her social work courses include one day a week spent doing field work.
00:51:59
So Marian is assigned to a compound of little houses where families are sent by a judge to live.
00:52:05
Generally, if the father is an alcoholic and can't function, the families are sent to these little houses.
00:52:10
Marian and her fellow students usually help out here by doing activities with the kids.
00:52:15
Deportations of Jewish people are beginning to happen around Amsterdam at this time, and they're told that they're being deported to work camps and that families will be kept together.
00:52:24
But this is, of course, not true. One day, a police officer tips off the head social worker at Marianne's field assignment that a Jewish family in that compound where she helps the children was going to be arrested and deported that night.
00:52:37
And so the social worker, the head social worker asked each of the social worker students, including Marion, to take home a child from that family, knowing that what's happening when they get deported is not good and it's not what they're saying it's going to be.
00:52:52
Yeah. So that night, Marion shows up at home with a little two-year-old boy. It's just this dress of like even just thinking about babysitting my own niece.
00:53:02
We're just like, here, take a two-year-old for the day. From their family. From their family.
00:53:07
Because the family doesn't know they're ever going to see them again. Yeah. Nothing's familiar.
00:53:10
The tension is right there. And then just like tend to that child. Because people are, I mean, it's just like ice.
00:53:17
You can imagine the same thing happening right now. Be like, take this kid home because their parents might never be heard from again.
00:53:23
And they will be part of that unless you take this child home. I mean, that is happening to people that did happen to people.
00:53:29
Or like little kids sat at home alone because their parents were taken and gone.
00:53:33
And they were just like sitting in a house by themselves, sitting in an apartment by themselves.
00:53:37
So her parents are completely on board with this, and they take care of this little boy for months.
00:53:43
Marion's father understands that the boy must be kept hidden, but her mom doesn't totally understand the severity and is less secretive about housing the boy.
00:53:51
She, like, mentions it to the milkman, who luckily doesn't say anything. But Marion is very aware via the Nazi newspapers that citizens are given a reward for turning in their Jewish neighbors and any neighbors that are hiding Jewish people
00:54:08
That in today's money, $5 in 1941 or so. But also in Dutch, I'm not going to make you do it.
00:54:16
$300? $110. And they also warned Dutch people not to aid their Jewish neighbors or that they too will be deported.
00:54:23
So it's just it's not a slap on the wrist if you are trying to help hide Jewish people.
00:54:28
It's you're just treated, you know. Yeah. Everybody. Criminal. Yeah. Everybody goes down.
00:54:33
Also, that idea that people because it's wartime, like I was just talking about where it's it's the rationing.
00:54:39
Five dollars is so much money. Totally. But if you plant a victory garden, you are not as desperate.
00:54:44
Right. You know, if there's a potato to go around, you don't have to take that money.
00:54:48
My grandma, you know, lived in the fields in Poland for the first seven years of her life because they burnt down her village in the Kwagram.
00:54:56
So she was like the youngest of five or six kids. And her mom would work the potato farms during the day and steal a potato.
00:55:05
They'd eat the inside of the potato for dinner one night. And the next night they'd eat the skins of the potato.
00:55:12
And that was what they survived on for seven years. Oh, my God. And then one of her brothers would steal a horse from, he was like a really charming kid.
00:55:23
He'd steal a horse from one side, like the German side, and then sell it back to them the next day.
00:55:29
Yes. They survived somehow. You have to. Yeah. Good. Okay. So one day around the spring of 1942, when Marian is 21 years old, she's riding her bike to class when she passes a home for Jewish children.
00:55:41
These are children that had been brought from Germany into the Netherlands to protect them from the Nazis.
00:55:46
And now they're being deported, most likely to a transit camp in the Netherlands and then Auschwitz.
00:55:52
Generally at these camps, children under 15 are just killed when they arrive immediately.
00:55:56
They can't work. Elsewhere in Amsterdam, Anne Frank's family will go into hiding a few months later in the summer of 1942.
00:56:03
When she and her family are eventually discovered and arrested, they are sent to this transport camp and then to Auschwitz.
00:56:09
So these children who had left their home countries and their homes are now being rounded up in front of her face.
00:56:17
So Marion, of course, doesn't know any of this yet, but watches in horror as she sees Nazis throwing children onto trucks by their arms, their legs, one little girl by her pigtails.
00:56:29
Marion says, quote, I'm sitting on my bike and not believing my eyes. There's two women coming from the other direction, and they tried to stop the Nazis, and they picked the women up and threw them on top of the kids and drove off.
00:56:41
And that was when I fully consciously decided that this was it, end quote. So at 21 years old, Marion decides to be formally involved in the hiding of Jewish children from the Nazis.
00:56:52
Marion points out that, quote, most rescue in Holland was not organized. It was individual effort because the fewer people who knew, the better, end quote.
00:57:01
Yeah. The two-year-old boy that had been living with them had eventually been moved to another family.
00:57:06
And Marion doesn't want to bring home any more kids to live with her family because of her mother's mouth.
00:57:14
Her mother not getting it, it sounds like. Yeah, it seems like that's what happened.
00:57:19
So at first, Marion's main involvement is to help shuttle Jewish children. She wants to still do something, even though she can't hide them in her own house.
00:57:26
So at first, her main involvement is to help shuttle Jewish children around Amsterdam to families who can keep them hidden.
00:57:33
She and other young women carry the kids around on bicycles, mostly in broad daylight, because to any observer, it would look like a mother and a child, their own child.
00:57:43
On multiple occasions, Marian secures false papers for Jewish babies. She takes them to City Hall on what she described as a, quote, mission of disgrace, end quote, and pretends she's an unwed mother and that the children are hers.
00:57:58
So she has to show up and be shamed and just admit to being an unwed mother just so she can get these children papers, which is like, you know.
00:58:08
Incredibly badass. Right. For months, this is how Marion helps, shuttling children back and forth to families that can house them.
00:58:16
She estimates that she works in some capacity on the hiding of about 150 Jewish children.
00:58:21
Then, in December of 1942, a friend asks Marion if she will live with a Jewish man and his three young children to help keep them hidden.
00:58:30
They move into a house outside of Amsterdam, which is at the time unoccupied, but belongs to a relative of the friend who had connected marrying with the family.
00:58:40
So the father of this family is a man named Fred Pollock, and his children are Lex, who is four, Tom, who is two, and Erica, who's less than a year old.
00:58:50
And their mother, Edwina Moore, is only half Jewish, but has papers that seem to obscure that fact.
00:58:56
So she's able to move freely and she's actually a major figure in the Dutch resistance.
00:59:02
But the father and the children are all known to be Jewish, so they have to hide.
00:59:06
So Marion basically lives in this house and friends of hers in the resistance build a hiding place under the floorboards of the living room for this family.
00:59:17
By day, it's covered with a rug and a coffee table. And so the family is just able to live in the house.
00:59:22
But if they need to, the family can hide in this space. So Marion practices getting everyone in there so she can do it in less than a minute.
00:59:30
Like, it just has to happen really fast. So Marion's friends also leave her with a loaded revolver just in case.
00:59:36
Marion hides it on a shelf behind the bed she sleeps in and about a year passes without any incident.
00:59:42
And then one evening, Marion hears the engine of a car approaching and she knows that this means it's Nazis because local Dutch people ride bicycles.
00:59:50
So she quickly gets the family into the hiding place before opening the door to three Nazis and a Dutch police officer who is now a Nazi collaborator Fucking narc After not finding any Jews in the house because they all in the hiding place they leave
01:00:06
And so Marion has the family stay hidden for another half an hour. And then she lets the children out and feeds them and puts them to bed and just thinks that they...
01:00:15
They're gone. Thinks that the Nazis are gone. But then that Dutch Nazi collaborator comes back and quietly lets himself into the house
01:00:24
through an unlocked back door. And you've got to wonder, so he comes back alone without the official Nazis.
01:00:31
Is he thinking there's a woman alone in this house or is he thinking she's hiding
01:00:35
Jewish people? We don't know, but clearly fucking nefarious. Yeah, clearly there's something
01:00:41
to be exploited here and he's here to do it. Exactly. So Marion hears him and without stopping to think,
01:00:47
she grabs the revolver from its hiding place and intercepts him before he walks further
01:00:52
into the house to discover where the children are sleeping because we're not in the hiding place anymore. When they come face to
01:00:58
face before either of them can say anything, she shoots and kills him. She says, quote,
01:01:04
I couldn't think of anything to do but shoot him. End quote. Marion is 23 years old and she's just
01:01:11
killed a man and she has absolutely no idea what to do. But her good friend, a gay Jewish ballet
01:01:17
dancer named Carol, with a K, is being hidden in the garden shed in the house next door.
01:01:23
He has dyed his hair, has a fake ID. So he's able to move somewhat freely around the village.
01:01:29
And he hears the shots and runs over to her house to see what happened. She tells him what happened
01:01:34
and he says, I'll help you. I've got a plan. Marion says, quote, if it hadn't been for Carol,
01:01:39
we would have been in serious trouble. So this guy hears the shot and he's like,
01:01:44
let's take care of this. So essentially he goes into the village, wakes up the baker who he's friends with,
01:01:50
and then he and the baker go to see the local undertaker. Sounds like a nursery rhyme.
01:01:55
Meanwhile, they're all doing this after Nazi imposed curfew. So it's dangerous even if he hadn't been Jewish, but he is.
01:02:03
And so in the morning, as soon as the curfew is lifted, the baker comes over with his wagon,
01:02:07
loads the Nazi's body onto it, and then he brings the body to the undertaker. And I wonder how many times this happened. The undertaker puts the body of this Nazi police officer into a casket underneath another man's body.
01:02:25
Sorry, I had to jump on that. It was so satisfying. How many? And that idea that like there is something to be done within these insane circumstances, which is stick together and make a plan together.
01:02:38
Right. What can you do? If you're not the undertaker, you're the baker and you have a way to transport the body like you can do something.
01:02:43
Yeah. And everybody has a kind of part these parts to play. Right. So the Nazis buried that day with the other man and nobody is the wiser.
01:02:52
Marion says, quote, the world at the time did not neatly divide up into perpetrators, victims, bystanders and rescuers.
01:03:00
The delivery man wasn't actively involved in the resistance. The mortician wasn't actively involved in the resistance.
01:03:06
And yet, when asked, they cooperated. End quote. Because they know good from bad.
01:03:11
I mean, it is such a clear thing. Difficult if you are on meth, which many people were apparently.
01:03:17
Right. And difficult if you get brainwashed by this idea that you need to feel superior to something else.
01:03:24
But yeah, everybody else is looking at it going, yeah, if there's men picking up children by their pigtails and throwing them to the back of the truck, the men are the bad guys, not the two-year-old.
01:03:33
Totally. Or the kid with the pigtails. As for the Dutch Nazi collaborator, the guy she killed, it sounds like he had been disliked by everybody to begin with.
01:03:44
Yeah, he's a fucking Nazi collaborator. But it doesn't seem like even the Nazis looked for him.
01:03:49
Yeah, he wasn't one of them. Nobody goes looking for him. So no one goes and looks into it.
01:03:54
Great. Marion and the Polack family lived together in the house for about another year until the war ends.
01:04:01
So it doesn't seem like the story comes to light until later when Marian starts speaking about her experiences in the 80s.
01:04:09
So that was just kept a secret. Glad she talked about it. There were about 140,000 Jewish people living in the Netherlands and about 28,000 of them went into hiding during the war.
01:04:22
Of that 28,000, about 12,000 were ultimately discovered. In hindsight, we can see that people underestimated the dangers of presenting themselves to the Nazis for deportation to what were described at the time as labor camps.
01:04:37
So it actually overestimated the dangers of going into hiding. Yeah. Almost like that mentality of it'll just be easier if you do what they want.
01:04:46
Why didn't you cooperate? You should have cooperated. I think we've all learned that lesson at this point.
01:04:53
Yeah. Cooperation is the big mistake, and that's why they say that. That's why. Can't cooperate with fucking liars.
01:05:00
Yeah. Your resistance is crucial. Yeah. Of course, hiding was also extremely dangerous, but the odds of survival were better.
01:05:07
This could not have been achieved without people on the individual level, like Marion,
01:05:12
stepping in to help in whatever way they could. Marion points out that the parents who gave their children up to be hidden
01:05:18
were making the most wrenching decision possible and were not even completely sure it was the right one.
01:05:24
She says, quote, the greatest rescuers of children were the parents who gave them up, end quote.
01:05:30
I mean, there's so many stories from that time. Kinder transport and all this. There were like people who would smuggle the Jewish babies out of the slums,
01:05:40
what were they called? The ghettos. Yeah, the ghettos, where it's like a guy would go in to fix a pipe
01:05:45
and they would stick a baby underneath it. I mean, like those kinds of things are just like, thank God for those people.
01:05:50
My other grandma's from Warsaw. I mean... So bananas. After the war Marion works for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as a social worker in a displaced persons camp in Germany These camps were where survivors and refugees were housed until they could reconnect with any other surviving family members
01:06:11
It's just so crazy that like basically when the camps were, what's the word? Broken up, like invaded, liberated?
01:06:18
Liberated. When the camps were liberated, a lot of the prisoners had to stay there and live there because their homes had been given away or their entire families were murdered.
01:06:27
Yeah. They had to stay there until they could figure out what to do. A lot of that is hence Israel.
01:06:32
Like it's just such an insane extreme. What an experience. Like what a. Yeah. So basically they had to live there.
01:06:40
And there is where Marion meets a U.S. Army officer named Anton Pritchard. And they fall in love and get married at the camp.
01:06:48
I know. When life is that extreme, like something growing out of such incredibly dark, tragic times is the most beautiful.
01:06:57
I mean, that's like the human experience, right? Marion and Anton moved to New York where Marion goes back to school to become a psychoanalyst.
01:07:05
And she works at a renowned children's psychiatric hospital in the northern suburbs of New York City for much of her career.
01:07:12
She also goes on to teach at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester.
01:07:17
Thank you to Allie for putting it phonetically, which is known for its highly regarded psychology program.
01:07:24
She's educated new generations of mental health professionals, many of whom ultimately choose to go into the field because of Marion.
01:07:30
One colleague says, quote, not only did she save lives during the 1940s, but she continues to save lives today through her influence, end quote.
01:07:39
So yay for mental health professionals. Yeah. And leaders. Yeah. And Marion dies in 2016 at the age of 96.
01:07:48
Her family writes an obituary about her, detailing her accomplishments in World War II.
01:07:53
But this is the anecdote they end with, saying, quote, Marion Pritchard was loving and caring with family and friends, an involved and conscientious citizen and a person of great courage and compassion.
01:08:05
On one occasion, an adult niece and her husband arrived at her home frazzled from a long trip with four restless children.
01:08:12
One of them asked, is there life after children? Marion calmly replied, life is children.
01:08:18
Oh. End quote. And that is the story of Dutch resistance hero Marion Pritchard. Wow.
01:08:25
I don't, I mean, I feel like I've heard versions of that story or like the fictionalized versions of that story.
01:08:31
But I love hearing the name. So that's for Women's History Month and for how fucked up the world is right now.
01:08:38
Yeah, really. Marion, she was doing it. She didn't give a shit. No. She did give a shit.
01:08:44
She did give a shit. You have to give a shit. You have to give a shit. You have to make the baker give a shit.
01:08:48
You have to make the undertaker give a shit. You have to organize them. That's right.
01:08:52
And then save some people. That's right. It's not a tall task. I mean, be a decent human being is all we're asking.
01:09:01
Just save some children. Focus on children. That's right. For once in your life.
01:09:07
Well, that was a very deep episode that we just did. I didn't expect that. That was a very, like, moving episode.
01:09:15
Yeah. Good job, you guys. Hey, listeners, handle it. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
01:09:22
Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production.
01:09:34
Our senior producer is Molly Smith and our associate producer is Tessa Hughes. Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.
01:09:39
This episode was mixed by Liana Squalachi. Our researchers are Maren McGlachin and Allie Elkin.
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