Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Britain's Schindler, Sir Nicholas Winton, Dies at 106


Dubbed 'Britain's Schindler', Sir Nicholas Winton saved the lives of 669 Jewish children from the Holocaust during the Second World War.
(The Telegraph) Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised the rescue of Jewish children from the Holocaust in 1939, has died aged 106, his family said.

Winton earned himself the label "Britain's Schindler" for saving the lives of 669 children by sending them from Prague to London by train.

His son-in-law Stephen Watson said Sir Nicholas died peacefully in his sleep at Wexham Hospital in Slough.

Sir Nicholas rarely spoke of his achievements, believing his actions to be unremarkable. But he kept a scrapbook with details and photographs of the children he saved.

He came to public attention only in 1988, when a family friend sent the scrapbook to the BBC and he was reunited with some of those who call themselves "Nicky's Children" on an emotional episode of the programme That's Life!

His extraordinary story began in December 1938 when, as a 29-year-old stockbroker, he cancelled a skiing holiday and instead visited Prague at the request of a friend who urged him to be witness to the country's plight. The Nazis had invaded the Sudetenland two months earlier and the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews.

While agencies were organising the mass evacuation of children from Austria and Germany, there was no such provision in Czechoslovakia.

Sir Nicholas returned to Britain and masterminded the rescue mission - finding adoptive homes for the children, securing exit and entry permits for them, and ensuring each had the required £50 guarantee (£2,500 in today's money) enabling them to travel. On some occasions, he forged Home Office documents which had been too slow to arrive, and without which the children would not have been allowed to leave.

He and his mother collected the children at Liverpool Street Station and sent them on to new homes, either with relatives or strangers who had volunteered to take them in.

Eight trains reached London but the ninth did not. It had been set to leave on September 1 1939, carrying 250 children. But that day Germany invaded Poland and all borders were closed. Parents desperate to spirit their children to safety were turned away at the station gates. It is thought nearly all the children due to leave that day ended up in the concentration camps.

But Sir Nicholas saved so many lives that an estimated 6,000 people across the world are descendants of "Nicky's Children". They include Karel Reisz, director of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Joe Schlesinger, the Canadian television journalist; and Lord Dubs, the Labour peer.

After the war, Sir Nicholas joined the International Refugee Organisation, part of the United Nations. His role including supervising the disposal of items - including crates of false teeth, reading glasses and gold fillings - taken from victims of the gas chambers.

In his later years he worked for the Abbeyfield organisation, which provides care for the elderly. Some years ago, a chance conversation uncovered the fact that one of his fellow trustees was the son of a child Sir Nicholas had saved.

He was knighted by the Queen in 2003 "for services to humanity", with the monarch telling him: "It's wonderful that you were able to save so many children."

In 2010 he was awarded a Hero of the Holocaust medal at 10 Downing Street, and last year received the Czech Republic's highest honour, the Order of the White Lion. The Czech president, Milos Zeman, told him he had given the children "the greatest possible gift: the chance to live and to be free".