A young Nicholas Winton
Last week, British stockbroker and World War II hero Nicholas Winton died at the ripe old age of 106. Working on his own, Winton was responsible for saving the lives of more than 650 Jewish children trapped in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the years leading up to World War II. He arranged safe passage for the children, who were placed with foster families in the UK for the duration of the war. Although he was compared to such fellow Holocaust rescuers, such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, Winton kept his story mostly secret for nearly 50 years. Here is the life story of this incredible man, whose work touched countless lives.
Winton himself was of Jewish descent; his parents were German Jewish immigrants to the UK, who changed their last name to “Winton” and converted to Anglicanism in an effort to assimilate. As a young man, Winton worked various finance jobs throughout Europe before he returned to England to work in the London Stock Exchange. In 1938, Winton was recruited by a friend to help work with Czech refugees. He was shocked by what he found, as not much works was being done to save Jews in Czechoslovakia.
At the time, the British government established the Kindertransport program, which allowed for the entry of refugee children, provided that they had host families in the UK. Working to help children through this program, Winton met with parents and gathered information on as many as 5,000 children in immediate danger, working out of a hotel room in Prague. When his work aroused German suspicion, Winton bribed the Germans with money out of his own pocket. With nothing but photos of the Czech children, Winton returned to Britain, where he and a group of friends and family members began recruiting host families for these children.
Throughout 1939, Winton arranged a total of eight transports, carrying 669 children to safety. Despite this success, Winton remain haunted by the ninth planned transport, which would have carried 250 children before it was halted by the German invasion of Poland. Out of the 250 children registered for this last transport, none of them were ever heard from again. During the war itself, Winton worked for the Red Cross, and later served in the Royal Air Force. After the war, Winton continued his humanitarian work, raised a family and found work in the financial sector.
Winton remained silent about his work until 1988, when his wife Grete came across a scrapbook in the attic that detailed his work, in addition to intact lists of the 669 children and the addressed of their British host families. After Grete gave this scrapbook to a Holocaust scholar, Winton received widespread attention. However, a humble Winton he rejected this attention, minimising his own work in the Kindertransports and deflecting the attention to the people who worked with him, many of whom faced immediate threats at the hands of the Gestapo. Nonetheless, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003, had a minor planet named after him by Czech astronomers and was awarded the Czech Order of the White Lion. And without a doubt, this attention is well-deserved; there are now over 5,000 people alive today who are direct descendants of those children that Winton saved.
from Shazan Qureshi’s History Blog http://ift.tt/1JSbD2h
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