Sir Nicholas Winton.

Tuesday, 27 May 2014

Maf 19th is the 105th birthday of Sir Nicholas Winton. In 1939, Sir Nicholas masterminded the transportation of children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Britain, saving them from the concentration camps.

in 1938 a friend urged Winton to abandoned his plans to go skiing and instead go visit Prague to witness what was happening in the country considering that Germany had invaded Sudetenland a couple of months earlier and Prague was becoming a dangerous place for Jews.

At that time agencies were planning the mass evacuation of Jewish children from Austria and Germany but none for Czechoslovakia.

Sir Nicholas Winton began meeting with parents who were desperate to get their children to safety. Winton soon began compiling a list of the names of these children.

On March 14, the day before German troops marched into Czechoslovakia, the first train with rescued children left Prague.

Sir Nicholas Winton went to Britain to mastermind the rescue mission making sure that each child had an adoptive home, pleaded for funds to make sure each child had money secured to one day return home, and securing permits to enter and exit the country. Rumors have it that in some cases Winton forged some documents to some of these children were able to Czechoslovakia since some of the permits were taking too long to arrive.

A total of eight trains carrying children reached London. The ninth did not due to Germany invading Poland and all borders being closed. That train was carrying a total of 250 children.

Winton rarely spoke of what he did, the reason it went into public was because he kept a scrapbook containing pictures of the children, documents, letters and a list of the children who were rescued; a family friend gave the scrapbook to a local newspaper and soon the story was taken up by That’s Life!, the consumer program hosted by Esther Rantzen.

Sir Nicholas Winton, who was then 78, was invited to the show and to his surprise the audience was made up of the now adults he had once rescued as children.

One of the guest at his birthday celebration was Lord Dubs who was one of the many he rescued. He was six years old when his parents put him on one of the trains. His parents survived and was reunited with them after the war.

While the exact number of children rescued by this man and his efforts is not known, it is estimated that he did save 669 Jewish children.

In 1998, president Václav Havel invited Winton for a private visit to Prague and awarded him with the order of T.G. Masaryk. In his home country, Winton was awarded the OBE. Thus his full name now goes by the title Sir Nicholas Winton. There is also a petition on Change.org for him to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

“Most of the children never saw their parents again so I was exceptional. Don’t put me down as typical. I can still see Prague station – the children, the parents, the soldiers with swastikas. We set off and when the next evening we got to Holland, all the older ones cheered because we were out of reach of the Nazis. I didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood what had happened and discovered all about Nicholas. When you meet somebody who almost certainly saved your life, it’s very emotional. I didn’t quite know how to handle it. I owe my life to him.” -Lord Dubs

-That.One.Mexican.Chick-