Nicholas Winton

The story in the curator’s words

A call from Prague, 1938

In the winter of 1938 a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton was about to leave for a skiing holiday in Switzerland. A friend called instead from Prague: come see what is happening here. Winton went. What he found was a city filling with refugee families who had fled the Nazi advance after the Munich Agreement, living in freezing camps, with the borders closing around their children.

He decided, almost on his own, that the children at least could be gotten out. He set up a makeshift office in his hotel room, then at a dining table in London, and began building lists: names, ages, photographs of children whose parents were trying to save them by giving them away.

Fifty pounds a child

Britain would take the children, but only on hard terms: a foster family for each one, and a guarantee of fifty pounds (a large sum then) to pay for an eventual return that, for most, would never come. Winton found the families, raised the money, and when the paperwork did not move fast enough, he is widely reported to have forged the documents the children needed to travel.

The trains

Across 1939, train after train carried the children out of Prague, across the breadth of Nazi Germany, to a London station where strangers waited to take them in. In all, 669 children reached safety this way.

The largest transport of all was scheduled to leave on the first of September, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. The borders slammed shut. That train never left, and the children who would have been on it were, almost without exception, never seen again. That was the one he talked about.

The scrapbook, and 1988

After the war he kept a scrapbook of the names, photographs and lists, and went back to his working life.

The story reached a wide public in 1988, when the scrapbook came to light. The BBC program That’s Life seated him quietly in a studio audience, then asked everyone in the room who owed their life to Nicholas Winton to stand. Around him, one by one, grown men and women rose to their feet. He turned, and wept. He had never known most of them had lived.