A Hampstead childhood
Nicholas George Winton was born on May 19, 1909, in Hampstead, London, the middle of three children of Rudolph Wertheim, a bank manager, and his wife Barbara, née Wertheimer. Both parents were German Jews who had settled in London only two years before. Like many immigrant families of their class, they set out to belong: they changed the family name from Wertheim to Winton, converted to Christianity, and had their son baptised in the Church of England. Nicholas was therefore born to Jewish parents but raised as an Anglican, a background that later made him, in the eyes of many, an outsider who saved Jewish children, when in fact he came from the same German-Jewish world as many of the families he helped.
The family was cultured and well connected. His mother’s siblings included the psychiatrists Fredric Wertham and Ida Macalpine. In 1923 Nicholas entered Stowe School, which had just opened, and became an accomplished fencer in both foil and épée. He left without formal qualifications, studied at night school and began work as a volunteer at the Midland Bank.
Banker, socialist, fencer
His early career took him across Europe. He worked at Behrens Bank in Hamburg and Wassermann Bank in Berlin, then in 1931 moved to Paris to work for the Banque Nationale de Crédit, earning a French banking qualification. Back in London he became a broker on the Stock Exchange. He was an unusual stockbroker: a committed socialist who moved in left-wing circles and became friendly with Labour figures such as Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee and Tom Driberg. Through his friend Martin Blake he joined a group of people alarmed by Nazism and opposed to the policy of appeasing Hitler.
He remained a serious sportsman. In 1938 he was selected for the British fencing team and hoped to compete at the 1940 Olympic Games, games that never took place because of the war.
Three weeks in Prague
In December 1938 Winton was about to leave for a skiing holiday in Switzerland when Martin Blake, who was working in Prague with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, asked him to come and help instead. The Munich Agreement of September 1938 had handed the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, and tens of thousands of refugees, Jews, political opponents of Hitler and others, were crowded into what remained of Czechoslovakia. Winton changed his plans and flew to Prague.
There, guided by the economist Doreen Warriner and other refugee workers, he saw the camps where families were living in fear of what would come next. He set up what he called a Children’s Section, at first using the British Committee’s name without formal authorisation, and began taking applications from parents at his hotel and later at an office in the city centre. Desperate mothers and fathers queued to register their children. In about three weeks Winton gathered names, details and photographs, then returned to London in January 1939, two months before German troops occupied Prague.
Paperwork against time
After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Britain had agreed to admit refugee children under seventeen, on condition that each had a home to go to and that a guarantee of £50 was deposited to pay for their eventual return. The scheme that became known as the Kindertransport eventually brought about 10,000 children to Britain, mainly from Germany and Austria. Winton’s task was to make it work for the children of Czechoslovakia.
Back at his desk on the Stock Exchange, he worked on the rescue in the late afternoons and evenings. He raised money for travel and guarantees, pressed the Home Office for permits, and searched for foster families, printing pages of children’s photographs in Picture Post to find people willing to take them. His mother worked alongside him placing the children. He wrote to governments abroad, including to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking them to take more; apart from Britain, only Sweden accepted any. Getting the trains through the Netherlands, which had closed its borders to Jewish refugees, required further guarantees and negotiation.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Winton helped organise eight transports between March and August 1939. The first, on March 14, went by air, the day before the Germans marched in; the others travelled by rail across Germany to the coast and then by ship to England. The scrapbook he kept lists 664 children; later research found five more, giving the total of 669, most of them Jewish.
The train that never left
The largest transport of all, carrying about 250 children, was due to leave Prague on September 1, 1939. That morning Germany invaded Poland and the borders closed. The train never departed. Winton believed that none of the children on it was ever heard from again, and he carried that knowledge for the rest of his life. Many of the children who did reach Britain learned after the war that their parents had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Winton always insisted that the rescue was a team effort. In Prague the work was carried on, at growing personal risk after the German occupation, by Trevor Chadwick, Doreen Warriner, Beatrice Wellington, Bill Barazetti and others, including the American Unitarians Waitstill and Martha Sharp and the Quaker Tessa Rowntree. Winton wrote that Chadwick ‘deserves all praise’. Historians have since stressed the same point: that one man’s story should not hide the many people who made the transports possible.
War, marriage and a quiet life
When war came Winton registered as a conscientious objector and served with an air-raid precautions unit and a Red Cross ambulance team. In 1940 he withdrew his objection and joined the Royal Air Force, rising from aircraftman to officer; he relinquished his commission in 1954 with the honorary rank of flight lieutenant. After the war he worked for the International Refugee Organization and then for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in Paris, where he met Grete Gjelstrup, a Danish secretary. They married in her home town of Vejle on October 31, 1948.
They had three children, Nicholas, Robin and Barbara. Robin was born with Down’s syndrome, and the Wintons refused the then-common advice to place him in an institution, keeping him at home. His death from meningitis in early childhood devastated his father, who poured his energy into local causes in Maidenhead, where the family lived: he helped found what became Maidenhead Mencap and the Abbeyfield housing society for older people. In 1983 he was appointed MBE, for services to the community in Maidenhead, not for the rescue, which almost no one knew about.
A scrapbook in the attic
Winton never hid what he had done, but he did not talk about it. In 1988 Grete found in their attic a leather scrapbook from 1939 containing the lists of children, their parents’ names and the families who had taken them in. It reached the Holocaust researcher Elisabeth Maxwell, and letters went out to the addresses it contained; some eighty of ‘Winton’s children’ were traced in Britain.
In February 1988 the BBC programme That’s Life! told the story. Winton sat in the studio audience, unaware that the woman beside him, Vera Gissing, was one of the children he had saved. In a later programme the presenter, Esther Rantzen, asked anyone in the audience who owed their life to him to stand; more than two dozen people around him rose. The footage made him famous. The British press called him ‘the British Schindler’, a label he found uncomfortable. Asked why he had stayed silent, he tended to play it down; Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust records him asking why people made such a fuss, and saying he had simply been in the right place at the right time.
Among those rescued were the future Labour peer Alf Dubs, the filmmaker Karel Reisz, the mathematician Heini Halberstam, the geneticist Renata Laxova, the Canadian broadcaster Joe Schlesinger and Rabbi Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss, later chief rabbi of the Edah HaChareidis in Jerusalem. More than 370 of the 669 have never been traced; many may not know how they survived.
Honours and old age
Recognition came late and then in abundance. Czech President Václav Havel awarded him the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in 1998; in 2003 Queen Elizabeth II knighted him ‘for services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia’. The Czech government nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008, a minor planet was named after him, and in 2014, at the age of 105, he was flown to Prague to receive the Order of the White Lion, the Czech Republic’s highest honour. A statue of him by Flor Kent stands on a platform of Prague’s main railway station, and in 2009 a special ‘Winton Train’ retraced the old route from Prague to London carrying survivors and their descendants.
Winton was a humanist and a member of Humanists UK. He said he had lost faith in religion during the war, unable to accept that people were ‘praying for victory on both sides of the same war’, and placed his trust instead in ethics: goodness, kindness, love and honesty. To mark his hundredth birthday he flew over White Waltham airfield in a microlight piloted by Judy Leden, the daughter of one of the boys he had rescued.
Legacy
Sir Nicholas Winton died in his sleep at Wexham Park Hospital, Slough, on July 1, 2015, aged 106, seventy-six years to the day after one of his trains carried 241 children out of Prague. His ashes lie in Maidenhead beside those of Grete and their son Robin.
His story has been told in documentaries such as The Power of Good, which won an Emmy Award, and in the 2023 feature film One Life, in which Anthony Hopkins played him in old age. Its plainest measure, though, is human: the children he helped save went on to have families of their own, and many now have grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their own. Winton’s example, an ordinary professional who saw a crisis, used the skills he had, and refused to accept that nothing could be done, remains one of the most quoted lessons of the Holocaust era. Late in life he warned that the world had not learned enough from it.
Sources & further reading
Nicholas Winton, Wikipedia · Nicholas Winton and the Rescue of Children from Czechoslovakia, 1938–1939, USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · Sir Nicholas Winton, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust · Kindertransport, 1938–40, USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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