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Kindertransport Hero: How Nicholas Winton Saved Jewish Children in World War II

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In 1939, Nicholas Winton, along with his British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) colleagues Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, were responsible for bringing 669 children from Nazi-occupied Prague to the safety of the United Kingdom. Winton’s remarkable story was told in the recently released film A lifestarring the brilliant Anthony Hopkins. The film is based on the book A life by his daughter, Barbara Winton, first published ten years ago and now reissued in 2024.

The book tells Winton’s life story and helps the reader understand how this unassuming, seemingly ordinary, typical Englishman suddenly came to be celebrated as a revered hero.

In October 1938, the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia, was annexed by Nazi Germany. The three million ethnic Germans were overjoyed to be reunited with their homeland; the 250,000 refugees who fled to the Czechoslovak hinterland were not. All this took place on the heels of the Munich Agreement, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as “a distant country about which we know little.” In March 1939, Hitler completed his destruction of Czechoslovakia by annexing the rest of the country.

During 1939, the BCRC sent eight transports of children – mostly Jewish – by train to London. These transports were known as the Czech Kindertransport. Winton raised money by publicising the plight of these children in the international press.

The British Home Office reluctantly took action to resolve the children’s situation. Each child needed a separate application, a medical certificate, a foster parent to care for them and the opportunity to pay the then enormous sum of £50 to cover the cost of their return journey. As history shows, there was no return journey – and no family waiting for them.

WOMEN who were rescued as children by Sir Nicholas Winton, at an event in his honour in Prague, October 2007. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The ninth transport train was about to leave Prague station when the Nazis loaded and threw out all the passengers who thought they were on their way to freedom. Many subsequently perished in Auschwitz. This was on September 1, 1939 – the fateful day that Germany invaded Poland – and all borders were closed. This failure to save those children was a black cloud that hung over Winton for the rest of his long life.

One of the most moving moments in British television history

Winton felt that this work had been unimportant so long ago, and he got on with his life. In 1988, he grumpily agreed to go on a television broadcast of That’s Life, one of the BBC’s most popular programmes. He was further persuaded to sit in the front row – and wondered what he was doing there. The presenter of the show, Esther Rantzen, then began telling the millions of viewers about Winton’s remarkable initiative all those years earlier in Prague. The two women sitting either side of Winton, Vera Gissing and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, had been saved by him. They embraced him. They were “Nicky’s children.” To a stunned Winton, 78, it was “an ambush of an unsuspecting innocent.”

The following week, amid publicity in the British press, Winton was persuaded to attend the show a second time, with Rantzen asking the audience: “How many people here today have been saved by Nicholas Winton?” Five rows of people in the auditorium rose to their feet for a stunned Winton and his wife. It was one of the most moving episodes in the history of British television.

Many of those standing on their feet were in their 50s and 60s and had no idea how they had reached British shores as children. Winton was the last link to their families who had perished. Emotions they had suppressed since childhood were unleashed when they came face to face with Nicholas Winton.

Winton was the scion of an upper-middle-class family who went to a fee-paying English public school and then began a successful career in banking. Despite this background, he witnessed the traumas of the 1930s: the Spanish Civil War, the Jarrow hunger marches, and the rise of Nazism. Winton—like many Jews of the time—was drawn to left-wing politics. All of this was essentially left out of the film for a 21st-century audience, but is detailed in Barbara Winton’s book. She writes: “His emerging social conscience led him into left-wing politics, where he was dazzled by passionate men and women who devoted their lives to causes they believed in.”

Winton’s observations in the 1930s convinced him to join the British Labour Party – and not the Conservatives. He became friends with Aneurin Bevan, the acclaimed leader of the Labour Left in Britain. This odd match came about because both had witnessed terrible events and were sympathetic to the Jewish cause.

Bevan left school in South Wales at the age of 13 to work in the Ty-Trist Colliery, and learned a hard lesson in life when his father died young of pneumoconiosis caused by coal dust. He later recalled being woken up in the middle of the night when an anti-Jewish riot broke out in Tredegar, Wales in 1911, so that he could provide shelter to several Jewish children who had been driven from their homes.

Bevan, a close friend of Israeli politician Yigal Allon, threatened to resign from Clement Attlee’s government in 1947 over Britain’s behavior toward Jews in Palestine. A Bevan follower and future British prime minister, Harold Wilson, described Bevan as “a significant cabinet discontent” in his opposition to Prime Minister Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. According to Wilson, Bevan was one of the few who stood firmly on the side of the Jews in cabinet discussions in the years leading up to the birth of Israel.

Winton was there when Bevan pushed for a National Health Service (NHS) “based on care, and free at the point of delivery.” No one, he argued, should be turned away from hospital doors because they couldn’t pay. Winton supported Bevan’s position that the state should fund this free health service for all. During the recent COVID crisis, ordinary citizens – Jewish and non-Jewish – stood on their doorsteps every Thursday at 8pm to applaud the NHS’s valiant efforts to tackle the pandemic. Nicholas Winton and Aneurin Bevan would have been there in spirit.

Winton’s grandparents were middle-class, assimilated German Jews living in Hampstead, London. His parents were baptized. He was never religious and never considered himself Jewish.

In 1989, Winton made his first visit to Israel and gave his scrapbook from those Prague days to Yad Vashem. He met several of “Nicky’s children” who had been saved by him. He was subsequently hailed as “one of the righteous of the world”, although he did not want to receive this award.

Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, was internationally honored, and lived to be 106. His daughter Barbara died two years ago, during the making of the film about her father, but this popular story has a huge impact. She wanted it to inspire people to make a difference where refugees are concerned. Today, there are 7,000 people alive who owe their lives to Nicholas Winton’s dedication.

Barbara Winton truly understood the meaning of the Talmudic precept of the Sanhedrin, which was presented to us: “Whoever saves one life has as it were saved the whole world.” This is her book, and his too.

A LIFE

By Barbara Winton

Robinson

282 pages; $21



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