His inspiration will live on," he said. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from to , called Sir Nicholas a "giant of moral courage" and "one of the heroes of our time". Sir Nicholas saved hundreds of universes," he said. He was an amazing man who saved many lives. Did you know Sir Nicholas Winton? Did he help you or members of your family? You can share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay bbc. Please include a telephone number if you are willing to be contacted by a BBC journalist.
Obituary: Nicholas Winton. Saved by the 'British Schindler'. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nick Higham looks back at the life of Sir Nicholas Winton.
In all, children made it to safety. However, a ninth train, which was set to leave on September 1, , and carried another children, never departed. On that very same day, Hitler invaded Poland and closed off all borders under German control, igniting World War II and bringing Winton's rescue work came to an end.
For half a century, Winton largely kept quiet about the work he'd done and the lives he'd saved during the early days of the war. Not even his longtime wife, Grete Gjelstrup, whom he'd married in and had three children with, knew anything about it. It wasn't until , when Gjelstrup stumbled across an old scrapbook stuffed with letters, pictures and travel documents, that her husband's efforts came to light again.
Despite Winton's initial reluctance to discuss his rescue operation, Gjelstrup, with his consent, turned the scrapbook over to a Holocaust historian. Soon others came to know Winton's story. A newspaper article was written about him, followed by a BBC special. Winton was praised around the globe, and letters of appreciation came in from major heads of state. Hailed as Britain's Oskar Schindler , the German businessman who saved some 1, Jews during the Holocaust, Winton received an American Congressional resolution as well as honorary citizenship of Prague, the Czech Republic's highest honor.
Streets were named after him, and statues were erected in his honor. In addition, several films were made about Winton and his work to save the kids who came to be known as Winton's Children. While a reluctant recipient of his global celebrity, Winton did welcome the chance to meet with many of those he had saved. Several different reunions were organized, most notably on September 1, , when a special train marking the rescues left Prague for London carrying a number of the original evacuees.
As he had seven decades before, the year-old Winton greeted the travelers as they came into London. Over the course of many interviews, Winton was asked why he did what he did. In December he received a call from his friend, Martin Blake, a schoolmaster, asking him to cancel their planned skiing trip to Switzerland that Christmas and urging him to meet him in Prague instead.
The city was filling up with an estimated , people, many of them Jewish, who were fleeing Germany, Austria and the German-speaking Sudetenland, which the Nazis had annexed the previous October. Others were from political families and opponents of the Nazis. Their living conditions in camps were pitiful and most were clamouring to get away.
Winton became determined to at least help the children of some of the families. He started taking names, and found his room at the Europa hotel in Wenceslas Square was besieged by families, queuing all day in the freezing cold to get their names on the list. Winton and his colleagues, Doreen Warriner, organiser of the committee, and Trevor Chadwick, took photographs and details of the children and began to organise their evacuation. The first flight of 20 left in January , sponsored by an organisation called the Barbican Mission, whose intention was to convert them to Christianity.
Winton, who was not personally religious, saw his priority over the coming months as helping to get the children out rather than converting them, but he would subsequently brusquely ask rabbis who lobbied him whether they would prefer the children to be dead or alive. The arrangements were, nevertheless, better than those of countries such as the US and Australia, to whom Winton appealed in vain.
As the situation in Czechoslovakia grew more desperate following the German occupation of the entire country in March , he took to forging the Home Office entry permits. That summer eight rail transports were conducted. A ninth Kindertransport, which was due to leave on 1 September with more children, was cancelled by the Germans, and most of those who would have been on board were subsequently transported to concentration camps.
Nevertheless, Winton and his colleagues had saved at least children: of them Jewish, 52 Unitarians, 34 Catholics and 17 others. Most of them, sent across Europe alone or with their brothers and sisters, would never see their parents and relatives again. Virtually none had any idea at the time who was instrumental in saving them.
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