A great man left us today, Sir Nicholas Winton who against all the odds, almost single-handedly rescued 669 children, mostly Jewish, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, dies aged 106.
“I knew better than most, and certainly better than the politicians, what was going on in Germany. We had, staying with us, people who were refugees from Germany at that time. Some who knew they were in danger of their lives”
Sir Nicholas Winton was 29 when he arrived in Prague in 1938 to visit a friend, and through the British committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia he sensed what was going on, and returned to London to organise eight trains, who evacuated the children.
His extraordinary humanitarian effort only became known in 1988 when his wife, Grete, found an old briefcase in the attic with lists of children and letters from their parents. His family took the scrapbook to Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life programme, where he was reunited on screen with one of the women he had saved.
He was finally reunited with hundreds of “Winton children”, and their children.