In February 1988 an elderly man sat in the audience of a BBC television programme. When the presenter asked whether anyone there owed their life to Nicholas Winton, more than thirty people around him stood up.
A holiday that never happened
Nicholas Winton was born in Hampstead, London, on 19 May 1909, to German Jewish parents who later converted to Christianity; he was baptised. By 1938 he was a 29-year-old working at the London Stock Exchange. Shortly before Christmas that year he was planning a skiing holiday in Switzerland, but a friend urged him to come to Prague instead and see the refugee crisis for himself.
What he found there changed his life. Prague was in the grip of a refugee crisis as the threat from Nazi Germany grew, and many of those in danger were Jewish. Doreen Warriner, who was helping refugees in the city, sent him to visit the camps where they were living.
Lists, photographs and £50
After the Kristallnacht attacks of November 1938, Britain had agreed to take in a limited number of refugee children from Germany and Austria, an effort known as the Kindertransport that brought some 10,000 children to Britain. Winton set out to do the same for children in Czechoslovakia. The conditions were strict. Each child needed a host family willing to care for them until the age of 18, and a guarantee of £50 had to be paid.
Winton took on the job of meeting those conditions. He drew up lists of about 6,000 children in need and circulated their photographs to persuade British families to take them in. In Prague, Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner helped compile the lists of children and travelled with them. Over about nine months in 1939, eight trains and one plane carried 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia to Britain.
The largest group of all, about 250 children, was due to leave in September 1939, just as war broke out. That train never left. Winton believed that none of the children on board was heard of again, a thought he found terrible.
Fifty years of silence
During the war Winton drove ambulances and later joined the Royal Air Force. Afterwards he worked for an international bank in Paris, where he met his wife, Grete, and later settled in Maidenhead, west of London. He spent decades volunteering, serving for more than 40 years as president of the local branch of Mencap, the charity for people with learning disabilities, and he co-founded and led the Abbeyfield Maidenhead Society.
He said almost nothing about the children. Then, in 1988, Grete found a detailed scrapbook in their attic. It listed the children, their parents and the British families who had taken them in. That February the BBC programme That's Life! told the story and reunited Winton with some of the children he had saved, now grown men and women with families of their own. He always played down his role. "I was there to save children," he said.
“Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?”Presenter of the BBC programme That's Life!, BBC, 1988, as reported by the Associated Press in The Times of Israel, 2015
The children who grew up
The children Winton helped went on to remarkable lives. Alf Dubs became a Labour politician and Member of Parliament. Karel Reisz became a filmmaker, and Joe Schlesinger a Canadian television journalist and author. Renata Laxova became a paediatric geneticist, Heini Halberstam a mathematician, Vera Gissing a writer and translator and Gerda Mayer a poet.
Many more lived quieter lives of service. When The New York Times invited Winton's children and their families to share their stories in 2015, the replies included Paul Salz, who left Prague at 15, served in the Royal Air Force and then worked for nearly 40 years as an electrical engineer at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California. Hanus Grosz studied medicine, became a psychiatrist and taught psychiatry and neurology at Indiana University School of Medicine. Peter Sprinzels earned a doctorate in biochemistry in Melbourne. Others became teachers, parents and grandparents in Britain, the United States, Israel, Australia and Canada.
By 2015, according to The New York Times, the number of the children and their descendants had grown to more than 6,000 people.
Honours, and a train to remember
Recognition came late but warmly. Winton was knighted in 2003, and in October 2014 the Czech Republic gave him its highest honour, the Order of the White Lion. He was also granted the Freedom of the Cities of both Prague and London. In September 2009, seventy years after the last train failed to leave, a special Winton Train carried surviving children and their descendants from Prague to London along the original route, and Winton was there to welcome them. A statue of him was unveiled at Prague's main railway station.
Sir Nicholas Winton died on 1 July 2015, aged 106. His story reached new audiences through the 2023 film One Life, in which Anthony Hopkins played him in later life, and through If It's Not Impossible, a biography written by his daughter, Barbara Winton.
Why it matters
Winton never claimed to be a hero. He described himself as someone who was in the right place at the right time and acted. That is exactly why his story speaks to people of every faith and background. He was not a soldier or a statesman. He was an ordinary man with lists, letters and a refusal to accept that nothing could be done.
Each of the 669 children was a whole future: a career, a marriage, children and grandchildren who would never have existed. More than eight decades later, those families are still growing, and every new generation is a living reminder that one person's decision to help can ripple outward for a century and beyond.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- Nicholas Winton, Wikipedia
- Sir Nicholas Winton, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
- Nicholas Winton, savior of children during Holocaust, dies at 106, NBC News
- Winton's list: rescue of Jewish children revealed after 50 years, The Times of Israel / Associated Press
- Winton's Children Share Their Stories (The New York Times, 2015, reproduced), Genocide Watch
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
