Meeting the British 'Schindler'
Updated on 04 September 2009
Penny Ayres recalls meeting Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised trains to rescue 669 children from certain death in the Nazi occupation of Czecholsovakia and bring them to Britain.
Today a train arrives at Liverpool Street Station to complete its journey retracing the route 669 children took to escape concentration camps 70 years ago. The journey on the Winton train has been organised to honour the organiser of those transports, Sir Nicholas Winton. Onboard are 22 of the surviving refugees.
Now 100 years old, Sir Nicholas will meet the "Winton children" off the train when they arrive in London this morning.
I have met Sir Nicholas on several occasions, but one of the most memorable was in 2005 when I, then a journalism student, questioned him about why a stockbroker from London would organise these transports.
Sir Nicholas was born in Britain. In 1930 he went to study in Germany. "I spent a year in Hamburg and six months in Berlin," he told me. "At the time people were only just starting to hear about this strange man with a moustache named Hitler."
By the late 1930's, Nicholas was working as a stockbroker in London. In December 1938 he visited Prague with Martin Blake, who then worked for the British Council.
"Martin was working with an organisation evacuating older people from Prague. He said he had to cancel our ski trip to go out and help. Either I could go with him, or go skiing in Switzerland without him, so I went to Prague to see what was happening for myself."
"We knew Hitler was marching through Europe. When Chamberlain came back to Britain waving the piece of paper signalling agreement with Hitler we all thought it was impossible," he recalled. "We all believed we were more in touch with what was going on than the politicians."
When he arrived in Prague, Nicholas was confronted with many people telling him that nothing was being done for the children, most of whom were Jewish and who would certainly have been destined for German concentration camps.
"My motto in life is that if something is not impossible then there must be a way of doing it," he said. "The trick is working out what is impossible."
Word spread that a British man was organising the evacuation of children from Czechoslovakia. He recalled how so many parents came to visit him and plead for their children’s lives in the couple of months he was in Prague.
On his return to London, Nicholas spent six months working at the Stock Exchange during the day and writing thousands of letters for the children in the evenings. Through his work he organised paperwork, homes and transport for the children.
The children left their families on the station platform in Prague, with only a suitcase full of their possessions. From there the trains carried them out of Czechoslovakia all the way to Liverpool Street Station. Families who had replied to Nicholas' newspaper advertisements collected the children from the platform. They identified each one by the tags around their necks.
Nicholas' effort rescued 669 children from certain death at the hands of the Nazi occupiers. On 1 September 1939 war broke out as the last of eight trains was due to leave Prague carrying another 250 children. The train never reached the boarder, and none of the children on board have been heard from again.
Today "Winton's children" are scattered all round the world. They have their own children and grandchildren. But for 50 years the children did not know the identity of their saviour.
"It wasn't a secret," he told me. "If people asked me I told them. But it only took six months of my life and even that was only in the evenings. Plenty of other things happened after that, like the war, which seemed to me to be more important."
