CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF PRIDE OF BRITAIN
This year, we celebrate 20 years of the Daily Mirror Pride of Awards, in partnership with TSB. Here, we revisit some of our remarkable winners...
Sir Nicholas Winton – Lifetime Achievement Award, 2003
Name tags around their necks, 669 bewildered children arrived at Liverpool Street Station in 1939.
They were greeted by Nicholas Winton, 29, a stockbroker who went on a skiing break in Czechoslovakia and was moved by the plight of Jewish refugee children fleeing Nazi Germany.
He worked tirelessly to arrange eight trains to London for them, even faking paperwork. The first left Prague on March 14, the day before Nazi troops marched into Czechoslovakia. He returned here to find families willing to look after them until they were 17. One child he saved was Ruth Halova who later said: “We loved him from the first moment. Who wouldn’t?”
For 50 years, he didn’t tell a soul about the children he’d saved from certain death in the gas chambers. Then, in 1988, his wife Grete found a briefcase with lists of children, photos and letters from their parents. In one of the most moving TV scenes ever Nicholas was reunited with his children on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life.
More than 39 million people have watched a clip on YouTube where Esther asks: “Is there anyone in the audience who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?” – and, almost as one, they all rise. He died in 2015, aged 106, but will for ever be remembered as the “British Schindler”.
Today, more than 6,000 people are descendants of Nicky’s children.