Discover how Nicholas Winton pulled-off such a dangerous escape plan. Sir Nicholas was knighted by the Queen in March His work has been likened to that of the "saviour" of Jewish prisoners Oskar Schindler, however it was a comparison he was not particularly fond of.
The Rotary Club of Maidenhead, of which Sir Nicholas was former president, said his daughter Barbara and two grandchildren were at his side when he died. He paid an emotional tribute to his rescuer as "just one of those very special human beings". His son Nick said of his father's legacy: "It is about encouraging people to make a difference and not waiting for something to be done or waiting for someone else to do it. We must never forget Sir Nicholas Winton's humanity in saving so many children from the Holocaust.
His legacy, as a point of light in an era of darkness, will forever be remembered". Michael Zantovsky, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United Kingdom, who was a close friend described him as "a positive man who radiated good". It was not until , when his wife Grete found a scrapbook from with all the children's photos and a complete list of names of those rescued that Winton's rescue efforts became known. Winton since received a letter of thanks from the late Ezer Weizman, former president of the State of Israel, and was made an honorary citizen of Prague in the independent Czech Republic.
Dubrovsky, Gertrude W. Six from Leipzig. London: Vallentine Mitchell, Emanuel, Murial and Vera Gissing. Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation. Guske, Iris. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, Harris, Mark Jonathan, and Deborah Oppenheimer.
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. New York: Bloomsbury, Korobkin, Frieda Stolzberg. New York: Devora, Leverton, Bertha, and Shmuel Lowensohn, editors. Sussex, England: Book Guild, Afterward, he worked in banks in London, Berlin and Paris. In he returned to England and began his career as a stockbroker. In December , Winton skipped a planned Swiss ski vacation to visit a friend who was working with refugees in the western area of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, which had fallen under German control.
It was during this visit that Winton witnessed firsthand the dire situation of the country's refugee camps, which were overfilled with Jewish families and other political prisoners. Appalled by what he saw, and aware that an effort was underway to organize a mass evacuation of Jewish children from Austria and Germany to England, Winton moved quickly to replicate a similar rescue effort in Czechoslovakia.
Working initially without the group's authorization, he used the name of the British Committee for Refugees and began taking applications from Czech parents at a Prague hotel. Thousands soon lined up outside his office. Winton then returned to England to pull the operation together. He found adoptive parents, secured entry permits and raised the funds to cover the costs of the children's transit.
Whatever costs these donations didn't cover, Winton paid for out of his own pocket. On March 14, , just hours before Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis took Czechoslovakia, the first train carrying Winton's rescued children left the country. Over the course of the next five months, Winton and the small team he had assembled organized seven other successful evacuation trains.
In all, children made it to safety. He followed his father into banking, and in the late s, he worked at the London Stock Exchange. In December , he was called to Prague by a friend, Martin Blake, who was there helping refugees of the German occupation, including politicians, intellectuals, Jews, and Roma. This effort, spearheaded by Doreen Warriner, was to evacuate to safety those who had fled from the borderlands called Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia when German forces had occupied the region after the Munich Agreement in September While in Prague, Nicholas witnessed the suffering of the Sudeten and German refugees who were living in atrocious conditions in camps set up around Prague.
He decided he had to help and drew up a plan, with the encouragement of Doreen Warriner, to try and bring endangered children, most of whom were Jewish, to safety in Britain.
The British government had agreed in November to allow Jewish children from Germany and Austria into the UK on a Kindertransport , but Czechoslovakia had not been included in that scheme.
0コメント