A very modest hero

I'm amazed and profoundly impressed to read of a man who saved hundreds of children from Nazi extermination camps just prior to World War II - and never spoke of it, until his wife discovered what he'd done. The Daily Mail reports:

In late 1938, Sir Nicholas [Winton], a 29-year-old clerk at the London Stock Exchange, had travelled to Czechoslovakia at the invitation of a friend working at the British Embassy.

Alarmed by the influx of refugees from the Sudetenland region recently annexed by Germany, Mr Winton immediately began planning to get Jewish children out of the country.

He feared, correctly, that Czechoslovakia would soon be invaded and Jewish residents sent to concentration camps.

He persuaded British officials to accept the children, as long as foster homes could be found, and arranged eight trains that carried 669 children through Germany to Britain in the months before the outbreak of war.




None of the children saw their parents again. One of the evacuees, Alexandra Greensted, 77, who lives in Maidstone, Kent, said at the reunion: 'It's a very emotional day for me. I can't remember much about the actual train journey.

'All I can remember is being at the railway station crying my eyes out. I left my father and two older brothers behind.'

Otto Deutsch, 81, originally from Vienna and now living in Southend, said: 'It's amazing. It happened so many years ago yet I remember it so vividly.

'I never saw my parents again or my sister. My parents were shot and what they did with my sister I really don't want to know.'

Sir Winton's story did not emerge until 1988, when his wife found correspondence referring to the pre-war events.

As prime minister Tony Blair praised him as 'Britain's Schindler', after the German businessman Oskar Schindler, who also saved Jewish lives during the war.

There's more at the link.

Survivors, relatives and descendants of those children met in London this week for a seventieth-year-anniversary reunion. Sir Nicholas, now 100 years old, was there to meet them.




It's a remarkable story, and a very touching one. Heartfelt congratulations and thanks to Sir Nicholas Winton for his efforts to save the innocent. May his eternal reward be great.

Peter