Historical · 1909–2015
Nicholas Winton
He rescued 669 children — and said almost nothing about it for fifty years.
In 1938 a London stockbroker went to Prague instead of skiing, and quietly organized the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children before the war closed every border. The world learned the scale of it only in 1988, on live television.
Curated by
Shelly Frank
President, Creative House Studios
“Some people change the world and never ask to be seen. Our work is to make sure they are — and that the organizations still carrying their cause forward are seen too.”
Shelly’s Take
Why we chose this story — Shelly Frank, Creative House Studios.
Primary Source
nicholaswinton.com
Sir Nicholas Winton Memorial Trust
Open original on nicholaswinton.com ↗
The Voices for Good film
A Creative House Studios film · a true story, researched by hand and voiced with AI.
Watch on YouTube — @VoicesForGood ↗The story
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.
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.
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. It was the one part of the story Winton could not bear to speak about.
Then he went home, put a scrapbook of names and faces in the attic, and said almost nothing for fifty years. Not to colleagues, barely to his own family.
In 1988 his wife found the scrapbook. The BBC program That’s Life seated him quietly in a studio audience — and 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.
The cause, carried forward today
World Jewish Relief ↗
The living continuation of the Central British Fund that co-ran the Kindertransport carrying Winton’s 669 children to Britain.
Further reading
More Voices for Good
This page asks nothing of Nicholas Winton, who died in 2015 at the age of 106. The rescue he joined was carried out alongside the Central British Fund — the organization that lives on today as World Jewish Relief, still moving children and families out of danger. Amplifying him is how we keep both the man and that ongoing work in the light. That is the whole of what Creative House Studios does here: tell a true story with dignity, and point to the people still carrying its cause forward.
Held to the Light
A quiet note when a new voice is lifted up. You’re in good company.