Nicholas Winton

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Sir Nicholas Winton MBE (born May 19, 1909) is a Briton who organized the rescue of about 669 Jewish Czech children from their doomed fate in the Nazi death camps prior to the outbreak of World War II in an operation known as the Czech Kindertransport.

His achievement went unrecognised for more than half a century until 1988. For fifty years the children did not know to whom they owed their lives. The story of Nicholas Winton only emerged when his wife Greta came across an old leather briefcase in an attic and found lists of the children and letters from their parents. He hadn't even told her of his efforts.

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[edit] Rescue of the children

Nicholas Winton, then a 29-year-old clerk at the London Stock Exchange, visited Prague, Czechoslovakia, in late 1938 at the invitation of a friend at the British Embassy. When he arrived, the British team working in newly erected refugee camps asked him to lend a hand.

He spent only two weeks in Prague but was alarmed by the influx of refugees, endangered by the imminent Nazi invasion. He immediately recognized the advancing danger and courageously decided to make every effort to get the children outside the reach of Nazi power.

'The commission was dealing with the elderly and vulnerable and people in the camps kept telling me that nobody was doing anything for the children,' Nicholas Winton later recalled.

He set up 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. 'It seemed hopeless,' he said years later, 'each group felt that they were the most urgent.' But Winton managed to set up the organisation for the Czech Kindertransport in Prague in early 1939 before he went back to London to handle all the necessary matters from Britain.

Back in London, Winton immediately began organizing transports to get the children out of the country, cooperating with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and the Czechoslovak travel agency Čedok. Working day and night he persuaded the Home Office to let the children in. For each child, he had to find a foster parent and a 50 pound guarantee, in those days a small fortune. He also had to raise money to help to pay for the transports when contributions by the children's parents couldn't cover the costs.

In nine months of campaigning as the war crept closer, Nicholas Winton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains, Prague to London (a small group of 15 were flown out via Sweden). The ninth train - the biggest transport - was to leave Prague on September 3, 1939, the day Britain entered the war - but the train never left the station. 'Within hours of the announcement, the train disappeared,' Winton later recalled. 'None of the 250 children on board 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.'

None of the children set to flee that day survived the following years. Later, more than 15,000 Czech children were also killed.

Nicholas Winton never forgot the sight when the exhausted children from Czechoslovakia piled out of the trains at London's Liverpool Street station. All wore name tags around their necks. One by one, English foster parents collected the refugee children and took them home, keeping them safe from the war and the genocide that was about to consume their families back home. Winton, who gave these children the gift of life, watched from a distance.

[edit] Winton commemorated

Nicholas Winton, one of the unsung heroes of World War II, known as the Schindler of Britain, is still revered as the father who saved scores of his 'children' from Nazi death camps. Vera Gissing, one of the children saved by Winton, has written his biography and scripted the film Nicholas Winton - the Power of Good, which won the Emmy Award in 2002. She says: 'He rescued the greater part of the Jewish children of my generation in Czechoslovakia. Very few of us met our parents again: they perished in concentration camps. Had we not been spirited away, we would have been murdered alongside them.' The documentary was directed by Matej Mináč, who had already made a feature film about Nicholas Winton called All My Loved Ones in 1998.

In September, 2001, Nicholas Winton was the guest of honour at the film premiere of his story in Prague. Winton was invited by Czech president Václav Havel and around 250 of the 669 people he saved were expected at the event. The biography, Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation, by Muriel Emmanuel and Vera Gissing (Vallentine Mithchell Press) was published in 2001. Winton insists he wasn't anything special, adding, 'I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.'

But survivor Vera Gissing said: 'I owe him my life and those of my children and grandchildren. I was lucky to get out when I did and having the chance to thank Nicky was the most precious moment in my life.'

The survivors, though many are now grandparents, still call themselves 'Winton's children.'[1] Among the children saved were Dagmar Simova, cousin of the Czech-born U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines (widow of architect Sir George Grenfell-Baines), whose father, Rudolf Fleischmann saved Thomas Mann by assisting him to gain Czech citizenship for his self-imposed exile from Germany after the rise of Hitler, Joe Schlesinger, the CBC correspondent, Julius Sidon from California, the brother to Chief Rabbi Karol E. Sidon of the Czech Republic, Lord Dubs, a Member of Parliament, Hugo Merom, the ex-Israel air force pilot and consultant who specialises in airport planning and acclaimed film director Karel Reisz. Forty-five years later Reisz actually met Nicholas Winton at the first reunion. 'I had never heard of him. I thought the Red Cross had organised it,' he said. 'I took my children and grandchildren - I think it brought it alive to them to learn where their grandfather came from. It was very emotional ."

Nicholas Winton resides in Maidenhead, Great Britain. He was honored with the title of Member of the British Empire (MBE) in 1983 for his charitable work with the elderly, mainly the establishment of the Abbeyfield Houses. During the summer of 1998, an event called "Thank You Britain," was sponsored by the Czech ambassador to Britain, honoring those who helped the refugees settle in the United Kingdom. In Czechoslovakia, he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Prague, and on October 28, 1998, Václav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, awarded him the Order of T. G. Masaryk in a grand ceremony in Prague Castle. In December 2002, Winton received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for services to humanity.

Winton was born to Jewish parents that converted and baptized him. (He insists that his genealogy has no connection with his willingness to transport the 200 youngsters from Czechoslovakia to Britain in 1938.) Because of this, he is ineligible to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. Not that it matters to Winton: As far as he is concerned, his actions weren't anything extraordinary.

[edit] Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good

In 1997, Matej Mináč a Slovak filmmaker produced a feature film, All My Loved Ones, which included a scene with Winton in it, at the end. This scene had such a powerful effect that Mináč decided to make a documentary film of Winton’s life, titled Nicholas Winton — The Power of Good. This film won the International Emmy Award in 2002.

In 2001, Charles and Rita Gelman of Ann Arbor, MI visited Czechoslovakia shortly after September 11th. While there, they met Matej Mináč and viewed the film. After seeing this film, the Gelmans decided that they wanted every student in America to see it. Today, the Gelman Educational Foundation distributes this film, free of charge, to educators across North America.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Poizner, Susan. "Winton's Wartime Gesture." The Jerusalem Report, (August 31, 1998)

BBC News. "Honor for ‘British Schindler‘," (September 26, 2002)

CNN, "British ‘Schindler‘ gets knighthood," (December 31, 2002)

[edit] External links

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