Quiet hero saved hundreds from Holocaust
Nicholas Winton helped 669 Jewish children escape from wartime Czechoslovakia
“Who’s helping the children?”
That was the question that Nicholas Winton, a 29-year-old English stockbroker, asked when he found himself in Prague in 1938. As war loomed in Europe, humanitarian groups had initiated efforts to aid Jews, political refugees and other groups endangered by Hitler’s advancing threat. But Winton found no such effort underway specifically for the children of Czechoslovakia.
Inspired by the Kindertransport, a rescue operation then in place for children in Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria, Winton set about a mission he called his “wartime gesture.” He was credited with saving, through his personal initiative, the lives of at least 669 boys and girls. For decades after the war, he kept his work secret.
By the time of his death on Wednesday at 106, Winton was internationally celebrated as a hero of the Holocaust. He appeared uncomfortable with the honours bestowed on him, which included a knighthood from the Queen, and remarked that the work accounted for “just nine months in a very long life.”
Those nine months began in December1938. By that time, European powers had signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed Nazi Germany to annex the Czech territory known as the Sudetenland. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain predicted that the agreement would bring “peace for our time.”
Winton was preparing for a ski trip when he received a call from his travel companion, Martin Blake.
“The skiing’s off,” Winton later recalled his friend saying. “I am off to Prague instead. I have a most interesting assignment and I need your help. Come as soon as you can. And don’t bother bringing your skis.”
Blake, a schoolteacher, was associated with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, an organization created to assist Jews and other targets of Nazi persecution who left the Sudetenland after the German occupation.
“I called myself Honorary Secretary of the Children’s Section of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia,” Winton told the Washington Post in 1989. “The other people,” he added, referring to government bureaucrats and others confronted with his doggedness, “they just called me a bloody nuisance.”
Winton occupied a hotel room in Prague’s Wenceslas Square and later an office where he collected applications from parents seeking a way out of Czechoslovakia for their children. Thousands of families lined up outside his door, according to an account by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Winton returned to England and began seeking host families for the children. He wrote letters to government leaders around the world, including in the United States. Nearly all of them turned down his requests for assistance.
Sweden agreed to take in some of the young refugees, as did Britain — provided that Winton could identify families willing to care for the children until they were17 years old. The government also required that he secure the staggering sum of £50 per child for their eventual return home.
Many of the children would lose their parents in the Nazi death camps and had no home to return to after the war.
While working at the stock exchange and with help from assistants Winton gathered or forged travel documents for the children, raised the necessary funds and recruited host families through newspaper ad- vertisements and other means.
The host families came from Jewish, Christian and other religious backgrounds. The first group left Prague by air on March 14, 1939, one day before Nazi Germany invaded the Czech areas of Bohemia and Moravia. Seven subsequent transports — the last of them departed Aug. 2, 1939 — carried the children by train through Europe and then by ship across the English Channel. Winton said he saw them only briefly at the Liverpool railway station before they were collected by their new families.
“Inside I was cheering like a football match, but outwardly I was calm and quiet,” he told the Observer, a British publication, years later. “I knew that for every Jewish child safely deposited on the platform that day, there were hundreds more still trapped in Czechoslovakia.”
The last train was scheduled to de- part on Sept. 3, 1939, carrying about 250 children — the largest of Winton’s transports, according to the Daily Mail. But Germany had invaded Poland two days earlier, war was declared and the borders were closed. None of the children slated to leave on that train are believed to have survived. “Terrible,” Winton said. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
According to the Holocaust museum, Winton was born Nicholas Wertheimer (other sources say Wertheim) on May 19, 1909, in West Hampstead, England. His parents, who were of German-Jewish ancestry, baptized him in the Anglican Church and changed the family name to Winton. He said he was not religious.
Asked whether he helped the Czech children because of his own heritage, Winton told the London Evening Standard: “That’s for a psychologist to answer . . . I didn’t do it because they were Jewish children. I did it because they were children.”
In the late 1980s, Winton’s wife, the former Grete Gjelstrup, found a scrapbook containing documents related to the wartime rescue effort. He had never mentioned it to her.
The scrapbook made its way to El- isabeth Maxwell, the Holocaust scholar and wife of newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell. Soon, Winton found himself featured in British newspapers and on the BBC television program That’s Life!
“May I ask, is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?” the host, Esther Rantzen, inquired. “If so, could you stand up, please?” To Winton’s shock, everyone around him rose.
Four of Winton’s “children” grew up to become Karel Reisz, the director of films including The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981); Alfred Dubs, a prominent Labour party politician in Britain; former CBC journalist Joe Schlesinger; and Dagmar Simova, a cousin of former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright. Another, Vera Gissing, wrote a book about Winton and said that he had saved “the major part” of her generation of Czech Jews.
Winton once reflected on his “wartime gesture” and why he had made it. “Why do people do different things?” he told an interviewer. “Some people revel in taking risks and some go through life taking no risks at all.”