In the winter of 1938, Nicholas Winton visited Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s Nazis has just annexed the Sudetenland in September 1938, an area of Czechoslovakia with a large German population. The agreement to let this go ahead was what the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said guaranteed “Peace in our time.”
While in Prague, Winton noted the many refugees pouring out of the Sudetenland, fearing they were going to be swept up in Hitler’s killing machine.
To Winton it looked likely the German dictator was going to order his soldiers to invade Czechoslovakia and he decided to try to do something about it.
Jewish Children Escape by Train
What Winton did, and he was only 29 at the time, was organize a series of trains to get some of the Jewish children out of harm’s way. He established an organization called the Czech Kindertransport and began collecting the names of youngsters who might be taken to Britain.
The Jewish Virtual Library tells how Winton opened an office “at a dining-room table in his hotel in Wenceslas Square in Prague. Word got out of the ‘Englishman of Wenceslas Square’ and parents flocked to the hotel to try to persuade him to put their children on the list, desperate to get them out before the Nazis invaded.”
Raising Money in Britain to Help Evacuees
Getting the children away from Hitler’s grasp was only part of the problem; Winton had to persuade the British Home Office to allow the youngsters into the country. The government agreed on condition that Winton posted a fifty pound guarantee and provided a foster home for each child.
Associated Press reporter Karolina Tagaris wrote (September 4, 2009) that Nicholas Winton “set about fundraising and organizing the trip. He arranged eight trains to carry children through Germany to Britain in the months before the outbreak of war.” In all he saved 669 children, of whom only a tiny number ever saw their parents again.
Stephen Adams, in The Daily Telegraph, (September 4, 2009) wrote that, “The ninth train, containing 250 children, was due to leave Prague on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war. The Germans never let it leave the station, and most of the children never lived to see 1945.”
Escape Journey for Jewish Children Recreated
Marking the 70th anniversary of their escape, 22 of the surviving children re-enacted their epic journey in early September 2009. Their train pulled into the same platform at London’s Liverpool Street Station where they had arrived 70 years earlier. And, there to greet them was their saviour Nicholas Winton, now 100 years old.
Each of the survivors was given a few moments along to speak with Winton. The Associated Press quoted him as saying, “It’s wonderful to see you all after 70 years. Don’t leave it quite so long until we meet here again.”
Nicholas Winton never Revealed his Exploit
The Daily Telegraph commented that, “Almost as remarkable as the scheme itself, and a mark of [Winton’s] modesty, was that he chose to conceal his achievements for decades.”
Greta Winton, his wife of 40 years, found a briefcase in their home’s attic that contained documents relating to the rescue of the children. Until then she had no idea about what her husband had done.
When the news got out of his extraordinary achievement he was knighted in 2002. At the arrival re-enactment Sir Nicholas’s grandson told reporters that his grandfather’s attitude in 1939 was, “Something needs doing and I am going to do it.”
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