The Man Who Saved 669 Children

In December 1938, Nicholas Winton was twenty-nine years old and working as a stockbroker in London. He had a holiday booked: a skiing trip to Switzerland.

Just before he left, a friend called Martin Blake, who was working in Prague with refugees, asked him to come to Czechoslovakia instead and see the situation for himself.

Winton went.

What he found

Europe was sliding towards war. A few months earlier, in September 1938, Nazi Germany had taken over the Sudetenland, the border regions of Czechoslovakia. Thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish families and political opponents of the Nazis, had fled to Prague. They were living in cold, crowded camps, terrified of what would come next.

In November 1938, Jewish homes, shops and synagogues across Germany and Austria had been attacked in the violence known as Kristallnacht. In response, Britain had agreed to accept unaccompanied refugee children from the Reich, under a scheme that became known as the Kindertransport. But the children in Czechoslovakia were not yet included in any organised plan.

Winton met the families. He saw the children. And he decided to try to get as many of them as possible to Britain.

The office in a hotel room

He began working from his hotel room in Prague, where parents queued to give him their children's names and photographs. When he had to return to London for his job, he carried on the work there, in the evenings, after a full day at the Stock Exchange.

Britain would accept the children only under strict conditions. Every child needed a British family willing to take them in, and a guarantee of £50 (a large sum in 1939) to pay for their eventual journey home. There were permits to obtain, papers to stamp and transport to arrange.

Winton and a small group of helpers, including his mother, printed the children's photographs and sent them out to find foster homes. They placed advertisements. They wrote letters. They pushed officials to process papers faster. When documents were slow to arrive from the Home Office, the team reportedly produced some papers themselves so that the trains could leave in time. In Prague, colleagues including Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner worked in dangerous conditions to organise the children's departures.

The trains

Between March and August 1939, eight trains carried children from Prague, across Germany and the Netherlands, then by ship to Britain. They were met at Liverpool Street station in London by their new foster families. The youngest were small children; the oldest were teenagers. Most would never see their parents again.

The largest train of all was due to leave Prague on 1 September 1939, with about 250 children on board.

That morning, Germany invaded Poland. The borders were closed. The train never left. Very few of the children who were meant to be on it are believed to have survived the war.

In all, 669 children reached safety through Winton's operation, according to the figure usually given.

Fifty years of silence

After the war, Winton got on with his life. He married, raised a family, worked for charities and did not talk much about Prague. Even his wife, Grete, did not know the details.

In 1988, Grete was clearing out the attic when she found an old scrapbook. Inside were lists of children's names, photographs, letters from parents and documents from 1939.

The scrapbook found its way to a historian, and then to the BBC. In February 1988, Winton was invited to sit in the audience of a popular television programme called That's Life!

The audience stands

The presenter, Esther Rantzen, showed the scrapbook and told the story of the trains. Then she pointed out that the woman sitting next to Winton was one of the children he had saved.

A little later, she asked whether anyone in the audience owed their life to Nicholas Winton. If so, would they please stand?

Almost everyone around him stood up.

The footage of that moment, with Winton looking around him and quietly wiping his eyes, has since been watched by millions of people around the world.

Afterwards

Winton became famous, but he always played down what he had done. He said that others had taken greater risks, and that he had simply seen what needed doing. He was knighted in 2003 and honoured by the Czech Republic with its highest award. He died in 2015 at the age of 106.

Many of "Nicky's children" went on to become doctors, scientists, artists and parents. With their children and grandchildren, their descendants are now estimated to number in the thousands.

Want to read more?

Barbara Winton's biography of her father tells the full story, including the work of his colleagues in Prague. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's encyclopedia explains the wider history of the Kindertransport.