Nicholas Winton and the Team That Brought 669 Children Out of Czechoslovakia

Nicholas Winton was born on May 19, 1909, in West Hampstead, London, to parents of German Jewish ancestry. By 1938 he was working as a stockbroker in London.

In December 1938, he was planning a ski holiday when his friend Martin Blake asked him to come to Czechoslovakia instead. Blake was working with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, set up after the Munich agreement handed the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany and sent refugees streaming toward Prague. Winton, convinced that war in Europe was coming, went.

In Prague, Blake introduced Winton to Doreen Warriner, a colleague of Blake's on the committee. The committee was overwhelmed trying to help political refugees, and Warriner, by Winton's own account, suggested that someone take on the children. Winton saw the refugee camps and knew of the violence of Kristallnacht in Germany weeks earlier. He organized a rescue for children from Czechoslovakia modeled on the Kindertransport, the wider effort that eventually brought about 10,000 unaccompanied children to safety in Britain.

The work began with paperwork. Winton set up a Children's Section of the committee and started taking applications from parents who wanted to get their children out. Back in London, he worked on it every evening after the Stock Exchange closed, using his home in Hampstead as an office.

The British government required a guarantee of 50 pounds for each child and a host family willing to take them in. So Winton and his helpers raised money, found foster families across Britain, and pushed the permits through. One early gift of a hundred pounds, from the Reverend Rosalind Lee, paid for postage and correspondence.

Winton was never working alone. In Prague, Trevor Chadwick managed the operation on the ground, dealing with parents, compiling lists, and traveling with the children on the trains. Doreen Warriner identified children in the camps and also traveled with them. In London, Winton's mother volunteered beside him, and she later ran an aftercare effort to help children whose first placements did not work out. Host families across Britain cared for the children, and parents made the unbearable choice to send them away.

Winton himself later said that rescuing the children required no special knowledge, only a great deal of effort, work, and initiative. Between March 14 and August 2, 1939, eight transports carried children to Britain. The official count is 669, most of them Jewish. A train scheduled for September 1, 1939, was cancelled when war broke out. Winton later recalled that none of the roughly 250 children who were to be on it were heard from again.

For nearly fifty years, Winton said little about what he had done. In 1988, his wife, Grete, found a scrapbook from 1939 with the children's photographs and names. The story reached the British television program That's Life!, where Winton was reunited with some of the people he had helped rescue. Many of them learned for the first time who had arranged their escape.

Honors followed, including a knighthood in 2003, the freedom of Prague and London, and the Czech Republic's Order of the White Lion. Winton tended to wave the praise away, saying he had helped a little and had been in the right place at the right time. Sir Nicholas Winton died in July 2015, at the age of 106.