Britain once again remembers the work of Nicholas Winton who saved the lives of so many children before the Second World War

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Nicholas, who was a wonderful example of what can be achieved by selfless determination, died at the age of 106 in 2015. The previous October he had flown to the Czech Republic to receive the country's highest honour, the 'Order of the White Lion', from the President, in recognition of his saving, though his 'kindertransport', 669 Jewish children from certain death under the Nazis in 1939.(link)

Now, bringing Nicholas back into view, we have the World premier of the film, 'One Life' starring Anthony Hopkins as the older Nicholas having its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and its European premiere at the 2023 London Film Festival, followed by a theatrical release in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2024 by Warner Bros. (link)

Although this extraordinary man outlived many of the children he saved, 6000 people are alive today because of the success of his efforts in Central Europe on the brink of the Second World War, 84 years ago. His motto had been : 

 "IF SOMETHING ISN'T BLATANTLY IMPOSSIBLE, THERE MUST BE A WAY OF DOING IT" 

Nicholas was born in 1909 in Hampstead, London, the son of German Jewish parents, Babette and Rudolf Wertheim. Due to anti-German feeling in the First World War, the family changed their name to Wortham. Babette became Barbara and both Lottie and Nicky (Nicholas) were christened. After the war they changed back to Wertheim but in 1938 to avoid seeming German once again, they changed one last time to Winton. Nicky, captured on camera with with sister Lottie and brother Bobby in about 1917. His was a favoured childhood and his father, a successful banker, housed his family in a 20-room mansion in West Hampstead, London. 

At the age of 14 in 1923, his parents sent him to board at the fee-paying public school for boys, Stowe School in Buckinghamshire which was newly opened. Although he only attended for three years, his time there had a huge influence on his developing character. He was inspired by the enlightened, charismatic principal, J. F. Roxburgh, and stayed in touch with him for many years.  It was also where he learnt and developed his love and skill at fencing, a sport he excelled at and continued into his 40s.  He regularly attended the school chapel and became confirmed in March 1925.

Then on leaving school, without qualifications at the age of seventeen, he followed in his father's footsteps and began his apprenticeship in international banking working first for Midland Bank, then Behrens Bank in Hamburg, followed by Wasserman Bank in Berlin. 

In 1931, at the age of 22, moved to France and worked for the Banque Nationale de Crédit in Paris, then returned to London and became a Stock Exchange broker. Witnessing the devastating effect of the Great Depression on British workers and their families in the early 1930s led him to politics. He joined the Labour Party, becoming friendly with influential centre-left MPs like Aneurin Bevan, Jenny Lee, Stafford Cripps and George Russell Strauss. His connection with them continued through the 1940s. It was their lively discussions about Hitler’s true intentions and the futility of appeasement with Hitler prepared him for understanding the situation in Czechoslovakia as it developed.

At the age of twenty-nine, before Christmas 1938, he was planning to travel to Switzerland for a skiing with his friend, Martin Blake, working for the 'British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia' trying to help those perceived 'opponents' of the Nazis fleeing from the recently German occupied Sudetenland region of the country.

He cancelled the holiday after a phone call from Martin who said : "I have a most interesting assignment and need your help. Don't bother bringing your skis" and at his request, joined him in Prague. They now visited Jewish families, fleeing Nazi persecution and living in appalling conditions in refugee camps. Finding no plan the get the children out, Nicholas set up office using the dining room table in his hotel room in Wenceslas Square in Prague.

He then set up an office with the young Latin school teacher, Thomas Chadwick, used to distribute questionnaires and register the children. When Nicholas was knighted in 2003, he said Trevor, who stayed in Prague to organise the evacuations, was the real hero. He arranged forged documents and had to befriend Nazi officers in Prague to fool them.(link)

He returned to England, visited the Home Office and found each child had to have a £50 guarantee to pay for re-immigration and a foster family to take them in and on receiving photos and names of children, advertised in papers and worked with organisations, like the Quakers, to find foster families while continuing to work at the Stock Exchange.

He now devoted late afternoons and evenings to rescue efforts, often working deep into the night, with his Mother as secretary and a few volunteers and pretended to be more 'official' by taking stationery from the 'British Committee' and adding 'Children's Section' to its header, making himself 'Chairman'.

Nicholas found that : "Officials at the Home Office worked very slowly with the entry visas. We went to them urgently asking for permits, only to be told languidly, 'Why rush, old boy? Nothing will happen in Europe.' This was a few months before the war broke out. So we forged the Home Office entry permits" and also paid off officials : "It took a bit of blackmail on my part. It worked. That's the main thing".

He now successfully organised 8 transports, the first by plane and then train and on September 1, 1939 found the biggest, cancelled when Hitler invaded Poland and all borders controlled by Germany were closed. He carried with him the picture of hundreds of children waiting eagerly at the station in Prague. He recalled : "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".

With the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany in September 1939 Nicholas served as an ambulance driver in the Army, before serving in the Royal Air Force and then trained pilots. After the War, he became involved with working for the mentally handicapped and building homes for the elderly for the Abbeyfield Society. In 1983 he was awarded the MBE for his work and saw the retirement village in Windsor, appropriately named 'Winton House'.

He said of his War work : "I didn't really keep it secret. I just didn't  talk about it". This remained the case until he was 57 in 1988, when his wife, Grete, found the scrapbook he had been given after the War in the attic, with the children's photos, list of names and a few letters from parents of the children to him and shared the story with Dr. Elisabeth Maxwell, a Holocaust historian and wife of newspaper magnate, Robert Maxwell, who arranged for the Sunday Mirror to publish articles on his deeds.

He made an appearance on Esther Rantzen's BBC tv programme, 'That's Life', in 1988 who asked : "Whether any in the audience owed their lives to him ? and, if so, to stand", at which point more than two dozen people surrounding him rose and applauded and because the programme was aired nationwide, many other rescued children wrote to and thanked him.(link)

Nicholas saw his story become the subject of two films by Czech filmmaker Matej Mináč: 'All My Loved Ones' and the award-winning 'Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good'. He met Bill Clinton at the New York Premier when he was 93 in 2002, who, as a luminary, Nicholas said, was his favourite, because : "You could have a proper conversation with him".

In  2003, a bronze statue put up outside Liverpool St Station, depicting the children he rescued and a thousand kilometers away and in 2009 a bronze statue was installed with Nicholas holding two of the children in Prague Central Station. Also, in 2010, a bronze life sized statue placed on the platform at his local Maidenhead Railway Station, showing him reading a book with images of the children and the trains he used to save them.

He added commentary to a 96 minute long documentary 'Nicky's Family' released in 2013 when he was 104 years old.(link) In the same year 120,000 children in the Czech Republic signed a petition to request he be awarded the 'Nobel Peace Prize'. In his last year he had his story told by the US tv programme '60 Minutes : Sir Nicholas Winton "Saving the Children".(link) He also received the Anna Politkovskaya Award. (link) Just before he died his daughter Barbara published his life story : 'If it's Not Impossible'. 

Nicholas said : 

"I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help. If people lived together, for the moment, their religion : the fundamental ethics of goodness, decency, love, honour. The world we be a different place".

* * * * * * 

On the death of Nicholas in 2015 I tweeted a link to the post I had composed for Nicholas to Roger Cohen, a journalist at the New York Times, for which he thanked me and the next day produced a moving article in the Times entitled :

An Old Man in Prague

The Discretion of Nicholas Winton

'An old man went to Prague this week. He had spent much of his life keeping quiet about his deeds. They spoke for themselves. Now he said, “In a way perhaps I shouldn’t have lived so long to give everybody the opportunity to exaggerate everything in the way they are doing today."

At the age of 105, Sir Nicholas Winton is still inclined toward self-effacement. He did what any normal human being would, only at a time when most of Europe had gone mad. A London stockbroker, born into a family of German Jewish immigrants who had changed their name from Wertheim and converted to Christianity, he rescued 669 children, most of them Jews, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939. They came to Britain in eight transports. The ninth was canceled when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 250 children destined for it journeyed instead into the inferno of the Holocaust.

Winton, through family connections, knew enough of the Third Reich to see the naïveté of British officialdom still inclined to dismiss Hitler as a buffoon and talk of another war as fanciful. He raised money; he procured visas; he found foster families. His day job was at the Stock Exchange. The rest of his time he devoted to saving the doomed. There were enough bystanders. He wanted to help. Now he has outlived many of those he saved and long enough to know that thousands of their descendants owe their lives to him.

Back in Prague, 75 years on, Winton received the Order of the White Lion, the highest honor of the Czech Republic. The Czech Air Force sent a plane. He was serenaded at Prague Castle, in the presence of a handful of his octogenarian “children.” The only problem, he said, was that countries refused to accept unaccompanied children; only England would. One hundred years, he said, is “a heck of a long time.” The things he said were understated. At 105, one does not change one’s manner.

Only in 1988 did Winton’s wartime work begin to be known. His wife found a scrapbook chronicling his deeds. He appeared on a BBC television show whose host, Esther Rantzen, asked those in the audience who owed their lives to him to stand. Many did. Honors accrued. Now there are statues of him in London and Prague. “I didn’t really keep it secret,” he once said. “I just didn’t talk about it.”

Such discretion is riveting to our exhibitionist age. To live today is to self-promote or perish. Social media tugs the private into the public sphere with an almost irresistible force. Be followed, be friended — or be forgotten. This imperative creates a great deal of tension and unhappiness. Most people, much of the time, have a need to be quiet and still, and feel disinclined to raise their voice. Yet they sense that if they do not, they risk being seen as losers. Device anxiety, that restless tug to the little screen, is a reflection of a spreading inability to live without 140-character public affirmation. When the device is dead, so are you.

What gets forgotten, in the cacophony, is how new this state of affairs is. Winton’s disinclination to talk was not unusual. Silence was the reflex of the postwar generation. What was done was done because it was the right thing to do and therefore unworthy of note. Certainly among Jews silence was the norm. Survivors scarcely spoke of their torment. They did not tell their children. They repressed their memories. Perhaps discretion seemed the safer course; certainly it seemed the more dignified. Perhaps the very trauma brought wordlessness. The Cold War was not conducive to truth-telling. Anguish was better suffered in silence than passed along (although of course it filtered to the next generation anyway.)

But there was something else, something really unsayable. Survival itself was somehow shameful, unbearable. By what right, after all, had one lived when those 250 children had not? Menachem Begin, the former Israeli prime minister whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, put this sentiment well: “Against the eyes of every son of the nation appear and reappear the carriages of death. ... The Black Nights when the sound of an infernal screeching of wheels and the sighs of the condemned press in from afar and interrupt one’s slumber; to remind one of what happened to mother, father, brothers, to a son, a daughter, a People. In these inescapable moments every Jew in the country feels unwell because he is well. He asks himself: Is there not something treasonous in his existence” '.