Kindertransport hero: Nicholas Winton’s extraordinary effort to save Jewish children in WWII

In 1939, Nicholas Winton, with his colleagues in the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, was 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 One Life, starring the brilliant Anthony Hopkins. The film is based on the book One Life by his daughter, Barbara Winton, first published a decade ago and now republished in 2024.

The book relates Winton’s life story and helps the reader understand how this modest, seemingly ordinary, quintessential Englishman became feted as a suddenly remembered hero.

In October 1938, the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia, was annexed by Nazi Germany. Its three million ethnic Germans were ecstatic at being united with the Fatherland; the 250,000 refugees who fled to the rump of Czechoslovakia were not. All this took place just after the Munich Agreement, when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as “a far-off country about which we know little.” In March 1939, Hitler completed his obliteration of Czechoslovakia by annexing the rest of the country.

Throughout 1939, the BCRC sent eight transports of children – mainly Jewish – by train to London. These were known as the Czech Kindertransport. Winton raised funds by publicizing the plight of these children in the international press.

The British Home Office reluctantly acted to resolve the children’s situation. Each child needed a separate application, a medical certificate, a foster parent to look after him/her, and the ability to pay the then-huge sum of £50 to ensure the cost of the return journey. As history records, there was no return journey – and no family waiting for them.

The ninth transport train was ready to leave Prague station when the Nazis boarded and ejected all the passengers, who had believed they were on their way to freedom. Many subsequently perished in Auschwitz. This took place 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 so long ago was unimportant, and he got on with life. In 1988, he grumpily agreed to go to a televising of That’s Life, one of the most popular programs on the BBC. He was further persuaded to sit in the front row – and wondered what he was doing there. The host of the show, Esther Rantzen, then began to tell the millions of viewers about Winton’s remarkable initiative all those years before in Prague. The two women sitting on either side of Winton, Vera Gissing and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, had been saved by him. They embraced him. They were “Nicky’s children.” For an astonished Winton, aged 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, during which Rantzen asked the audience: “How many people here today have been saved by Nicholas Winton?” Five rows of people in the auditorium stood up for a bewildered Winton and his wife. It was one of the most moving episodes in the history of British television.

Many of those 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 perished families. Emotions suppressed since childhood were released as they came face to face with Nicholas Winton.

Winton was the scion of an upper-middle-class family who went to a paid English public school, and then entered a well-trodden career path in banking. Despite this background, he witnessed the traumas of the 1930s: the Spanish Civil War, the Jarrow [England] hunger marches, and the rise of Nazism. Winton was drawn – like many Jews at the time – to the politics of the Left. All this was essentially omitted from the film for an audience of the 21st-century but is detailed in Barbara Winton’s book. She writes: “His burgeoning social conscience led him into left-wing politics, where he was dazzled by passionate men and women dedicating their lives to causes they believed in.”

Winton’s observations in the 1930s persuaded him to join the British Labour Party – and not the Conservatives. He became friendly with Aneurin Bevan, the acclaimed leader of the Labour Left in Britain. This strange match came about because both had borne witness to terrible events and were sympathetic to the cause of the Jews.

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

A close friend of Israeli politician Yigal Allon, Bevan threatened to resign from Clement Attlee’s government in 1947 because of British conduct against the Jews in Palestine. A follower of Bevan and a future British prime minister, Harold Wilson, described Bevan as “a significant cabinet malcontent” in opposing 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 preceding Israel’s birth.

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 at the hospital doors because they could not pay. Winton supported Bevan’s contention that the state should fund this free health service for all. During the recent COVID crisis, at 8 p.m. every Thursday, ordinary citizens – Jews and non-Jews – stood on their doorsteps to applaud the valiant efforts of the NHS to cope with the pandemic. Nicholas Winton and Aneurin Bevan would have been there with them in spirit.

Winton’s grandparents were middle-class, assimilated German Jews who lived in London’s Hampstead. His parents were baptized. He was never religious nor ever thought of himself as a Jew.

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

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, Winton was honored internationally and lived to the age of 106. His daughter, Barbara, died two years ago, during the making of the film about her father, but this popular account makes a tremendous impression. 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 the dedication of Nicholas Winton.

Barbara Winton truly understood the meaning of the Talmudic precept from Sanhedrin, set before us, that “He who saves one life, it is as if he has saved the whole world.” This is her book, as well as his. 

ONE LIFE

By Barbara Winton

Robinson

282 pages; $21