A Winton’s tale
SUSPICIONS NATURALLY arise when a biography is written by the subject’s daughter. Will it be a whitewash or end up as a hagiography? Both dangers are avoided in Barbara Winton’s tale, If It’s Not
(Matador, £12.99), of her father, Sir Nicholas Winton, the man from Maidenhead often dubbed “the British Schindler”.
This is because he saved 669 Czech Jewish children from almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis by bringingthemtoEnglandbetweenDecember 1938 and September 1939.
The reason she avoids such pitfalls is that her main purpose is to puncture the myths that have grown up around her father. These have become all the more pronounced owing to the adulation at his sheer longevity — he is now 105 and, although physically frail, still mentally alert.
The myths can be summed up in the frequent description of him as a wealthy English non-Jew who singlehandedly saved those children. In fact, Nicky Winton is Jewish, the product of four German Jewish grandparents and he was known as Nicholas Wertheim until he was 30. The confusion arose as he was born here and his parents had him baptised at birth for reasons of social acceptance. He now considers himself to be an agnostic but his Jewish roots are the reason why Yad Vashem never honoured him as a Righteous Gentile.
He was a stockbroker when he rescued the children, but not a rich one and he only remained briefly in the job, with many years spent as the modestly paid financial director of an ice-cream company.
Intriguingly, before his fame spiralled in recent times, he had received the MBE for his work on behalf of Mencap and Abbeyfield, which shows he is a man of many causes with a long record of acting on them.
But, if his daughter has unravelled many half-truths, including those about his solo efforts and how the world forgot afterwards, she does so without diminishing his stature. At a time when most people never imagined war, or stood by helplessly, he saw the warning signs and worked tirelessly to save those he could.
Some6,000descendantsarealive todaybecauseof himand,whilemuch has been written about that frenetic nine-month period, it is good at last to have the story of the rest of his life.