Nicholas Winton

Nicholas Winton was a twenty nine year old London stockbroker when he travelled to Prague at Christmas 1938 at the suggestion of a friend, Martin Blake, who had asked him to come and see the refugee crisis at first hand. The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, established after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, was running a small operation in Prague to evacuate adult refugees from the new German-aligned rump state. The operation had no programme for children. Winton looked at the situation, decided that a children’s transport was needed, and went home in January 1939 to set one up.

The operation he created over the next eight months brought six hundred and sixty nine Jewish and other endangered children, almost all of them between five and seventeen, from Prague to Britain in eight successful transports between March and August 1939. A ninth transport, scheduled to leave Prague on 1 September 1939 with two hundred and fifty children aboard, was held in the city when Germany invaded Poland that day and the Prague railway station was closed. None of those two hundred and fifty children survived the war. The eight transports that did get out were the largest single rescue of Jewish children from occupied or about-to-be-occupied territory other than the Kindertransport from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after Kristallnacht.

Winton’s method was the standard combination of bureaucratic improvisation and personal credit. He set up a London office in his mother’s house in Hampstead, with his mother Babette as the senior administrative officer and a small team of volunteers, including the social worker Doreen Warriner, the Quaker activist Trevor Chadwick, and the British vice-consul in Prague Robert Stopford. The team identified children whose parents wanted to send them to safety, found British foster families willing to take them, raised the fifty pound bond per child that the British Home Office required as a condition of admission, and assembled the paperwork for the British visas. Winton signed the visa applications. Where British foster families had not been found, Winton invented them, signing the papers himself in the names of fictitious sponsors and trusting that he would find real families before the children arrived. Most of the time, he did. The Quakers and the Anglican church helped to place the children with British families across the country. Some of the children, including the future Labour peer Lord Alf Dubs, were placed with foster families who became their substitute parents.

Winton said nothing about the work for nearly fifty years. The story emerged in 1988 when his wife Greta found a scrapbook in their attic containing the records of the rescue, including the photographs of each rescued child and the addresses of the British foster families. Greta Winton sent the scrapbook to the Holocaust historian Elisabeth Maxwell, the wife of the publisher Robert Maxwell. Maxwell arranged for Winton to appear on the BBC television programme That’s Life in February 1988. The presenter Esther Rantzen invited the live audience to identify themselves if they had been on Winton’s transports, and around two dozen of the rescued children, by then in their late fifties, stood up. The footage is in the BBC archives. It is the most replayed clip in British television’s coverage of the Holocaust.

Winton was knighted in 2003 at the age of ninety four. He received the Czech Order of the White Lion, the country’s highest honour, in 2014. He died in July 2015 at the age of one hundred and six. By that time the rescued children, their children and their grandchildren numbered around six thousand people. The figure is the cumulative count of those who would not have existed if the eight transports had not got out of Prague before the war started.

Yad Vashem has not named Winton Righteous Among the Nations on the technical ground that he was Jewish himself, by descent from his German-Jewish grandparents. The condition for the title is that the rescuer must be a non-Jew. Winton’s family had converted to Christianity in his father’s generation, and Winton had been raised an Anglican, but the Yad Vashem rule looks at descent. The case has been raised periodically and the rule has not been changed. Winton himself was not concerned with the title. He had said for the rest of his life that he was an ordinary man who had done the job that needed to be done, and that the praise was misplaced because the people who had stayed in Prague after the war started, who had risked their lives in the resistance, who had hidden Jewish families in farmhouses across occupied Europe, were the ones who had taken the real risks. He preferred to talk about Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, the colleagues who had worked the Prague end of the operation under German occupation from March 1939, and who he believed had done the harder work.

Winton’s grave is at the Maidenhead Synagogue cemetery, despite his Christian upbringing, at his children’s request, in recognition of his Jewish ancestry and the nature of his work. The plaque records his life simply: stockbroker, husband, father, rescuer.

See also

Sources

  • Vera Gissing and Muriel Emanuel, Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation: Save One Life, Save the World, Vallentine Mitchell, 2002
  • Barbara Winton, If It’s Not Impossible: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, Matador, 2014
  • BBC Archives, That’s Life, episode of February 1988
  • Czech National Archives, Prague, files on the Czech Refugee Trust Fund and the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia
  • The National Archives, Kew, HO 213 series on the Czech children’s transports
  • Lord Alf Dubs, A Home in England, Bite-Sized Books, 2021