Nicholas Winton's holiday

Few people could have put a holiday to better use than Nicholas Winton – I’ve been reading about him today. Winton, a 29 year old London stockbroker of Jewish origin, was about to go skiing in December 1938 when he received a phone call from a friend  in Prague asking him to go and help Jewish refugees living in terrible conditions in camps. He went. He was appalled. He did something. In three weeks there he planned the mass evacuation of Jewish children, organized the paperwork and set about finding host families and money to bring them to Britain, and bullied British officialdom to act.

 

During the first half of 1939 Winton’s kindertransport managed to bring 669 children in eight trains to host families in Britain. The ninth, scheduled for 1 September 1939, never arrived. War had broken out. The children waiting eagerly at the Prague station were spirited away. He remains haunted by the memory: "Within hours of the announcement, the train disappeared. None of the 250 children aboard was seen again. We had 250 families waiting at Liverpool Street that day in vain. If the train had been a day earlier, it would have come through. Not a single one of those children was heard of again, which is an awful feeling."

Winton with one of the evacuees

 

And Winton went back to ordinary life and never talked about what he had done – not even to his wife. It would be fifty years before she stumbled on a scrapbook in the loft and the whole story came out. Since then it has been widely publicised and the children of this evacuation have been coming forward – as ‘Winton’s children’.

 

Here’s a snippet from a TV programme about a reunion with the now elderly children and their descendents. It’s a real tearjerker. Winton is still alive. He’s just been awarded the Czech Republic’s highest honour. He’s 105.

Winton with the children