Nicholas Winton
1909 – 2015 · United Kingdom
Known for: British humanitarian who brought 669 children out of Czechoslovakia in 1939
“He saved six hundred and sixty nine children and said nothing about it for fifty years.”
Biography
Nicholas Winton was born in Hampstead, London, on 19 May 1909, the middle of three children of Rudolph and Barbara Wertheim, German Jews who had moved to Britain two years earlier, changed the family name to Winton and had their children baptised. He left Stowe School without qualifications and learned his trade by working: night school and the Midland Bank in London, then banks in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris, before returning home as a broker on the London Stock Exchange. He was a keen fencer, picked for the British team in 1938, and a convinced socialist close to Labour figures who opposed appeasement, and it was through that circle that a telephone call reached him at the end of 1938.
Winton had planned to spend that Christmas skiing in Switzerland. He went to Prague instead, where his friend Martin Blake was working with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and volunteers were trying to bring the children of threatened families to safety before the German occupation. After Kristallnacht the Commons had agreed to admit refugees under seventeen, provided each child had a place to stay and a guarantee of fifty pounds. Winton spent about three weeks in Prague helping to compile lists of children in danger, then returned to London and gave his evenings to the paperwork the rescue actually required: sponsors, permits, passage through a Netherlands that had closed its border to Jewish refugees, and photographs of the children placed in Picture Post to find them families. His mother worked beside him. In all, 669 children reached Britain. The last train, due out of Prague on 1 September 1939, never left; Germany invaded Poland that morning, and of the 250 children booked on it only two lived to see the end of the war.
Winton said almost nothing about any of this for nearly fifty years. The world learned of it only in 1988, when the BBC programme That's Life! seated him in an audience filled with the grown children he had helped to save. The British press called him the British Schindler, though he always insisted that the harder and more dangerous work had been done by those who stayed on in Prague, among them Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner. The honours came late: a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for services to humanity, and in 2014 the Order of the White Lion, the highest distinction of the Czech Republic. He died on 1 July 2015 at the age of 106.