In 1939, an unassuming British stockbroker named Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Czechoslovakian children from the widening jaws of the Nazis.
Winton, then 29, obtained permits for the children, most of whom were Jewish, to go to England and the surrounding vicinity.
Tomas Graumann was eight when he said goodbye to his parents for what he thought would be a temporary separation.
“My mother said I should learn English, and that soon everything would be normal again,” says Graumann, 78. “She was very positive.
“I’m not sure she really felt that way, however. I think I left her in tears.”
Tony, Graumann’s five-year-old brother, was scheduled to follow on the next available trip to England.
“My brother was sick when I left, so he had to stay behind,” says Graumann. “I promised him there would be another train the next month.”
The largest transport Winton had ever arranged pulled into the Prague station on Sept. 1, 1939 –– the very day Hitler invaded Poland and the borders slammed shut in all Nazi occupied territory.
Hundreds of children, including Tony Graumann, boarded that fateful train bound for England.
“Within hours of the announcement [that the borders had closed], the train disappeared,” Winton later wrote. “None of the 250 children aboard was ever seen again.”
The Nazis rerouted the precious cargo to the gas chambers at Sobibor.
Tomas Graumann will introduce the film “Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good” at the Fred Marcus Memorial Holocaust Lecture on Sunday, Feb. 8, 4 p.m, at DU’s Driscoll Ballroom.
Winton, now 99, never told anyone about his heroic deeds in Czechoslovakia until fairly recently — and with considerable reluctance.
“People can spend their whole lives talking about the Holocaust or say nothing at all,” says Graumann, who resides in the Czech Republic. “But for whatever reason, Winton felt there was no need to talk about this part of his life.”
Graumann, who speaks about his past in perfect, unflinching English, apparently took his mother’s parting advice in Prague to heart.
“She told me to be positive, and to learn the language,” he says.
Graumann was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His parents divorced, and Tomas’ mother remarried when he was about five.
After his mother remarried, Tomas went to live in a zamek, “a mansion. My stepfather was a manager, and we enjoyed a comfortable situation.”
Although his parents were Jewish, they didn’t really practice their religion.
“All I remember is lighting Chanukah candles,” he says. “But my parents always reminded the harvesters to leave plenty of wheat for the poor to glean, which is in accordance with Jewish belief.”
His parents had cousins who obtained papers to immigrate to Australia and encouraged them to do the same. “But at the last minute my parents decided to stay behind in Czechoslovakia.
“Then the Nazi tanks rolled into our village and a Nazi officer moved into our family home. That’s when my mother decided that something must be done.”
They contacted Winton and arranged for Tomas to go to Scotland.
“I went to live with a woman named Mary Corson,” Graumann says. “She had a home in a village on the west coast of Scotland.”
Corson, who had taught in what was then Palestine, initially wanted two girls. When that arrangement didn’t work out, Winton asked whether she would accept two boys.
“She said she’d try it out for one month and agreed to take me and another boy,” says Graumann. “It was a month-to-month thing, but it worked out.”
Corson, his “adopted” mother, was Christian.
“We read the Bible every day and said prayers before every meal,” he says. “We also went to church on Sunday.”
Graumann became a Christian.
After the war, he found out that his mother and brother died at Sobibor and that his stepfather perished at Majdanek.
His father, who owned a shoe shop in Brno, made custom boots for the Nazis. “He was doing quite well, but then someone told the Nazis that my father was Jewish. He committed suicide. That’s what I was told.”
When he learned what happened to his family, Graumann refused to return to Czechoslovakia for several decades.
He trained as a nurse and worked on a sparsely populated island in the Philippines, where met his wife Caroline. The couple returned to the US and raised a family.
In 1974, Graumann moved to Denver to attend Denver Seminary.
At age 62, he took early retirement.
Graumann returned to the Czech Republic in 1993.
“I wanted to do something in the land of my birth,” he says.
When he’s not teaching English or visiting his children and grandchildren in Denver, Graumann speaks about Nicholas Winton throughout the world.
“I’m alive because of Mr. Winton,” he says. “I wanted to do something to show my gratitude.”
Hailed as Britain’s Schindler, Nicholas Winton joins the ranks of rescuers who are finally — and humbly — admitting their role in trying to save humanity from the hell that was the Holocaust.
Books and films about Winton proliferate.
The man remains relatively silent.
Perhaps the facts speak loudest.
In December of 1938, Winton was about to leave London for a skiing holiday in Switzerland when he received a call from Martin Blake asking him to come to Prague immediately.
“I have a most interesting assignment and I need your help,” Blake said. “Don’t bother bringing your skis.”
When Winton arrived in Prague, he was appalled by the conditions in the refugee camps, where thousands of men, woman and children lived in squalid conditions.
The outbreak of war seemed inevitable.
He could have walked away.
Instead, he mobilized himself as an army of one, raising funds when the children’s impoverished parents couldn’t find enough money for a meal, let alone the possibility of life in a strange land.
He procured documents from the German and British authorities; navigated bureaucracy with subdued determination; and reacted to dismissive remarks — “Why rush, old boy? Nothing will happen” — with unerring instinct.
Winton organized the first air transport of children from Prague to England on March 14, 1939.
Until the borders closed on Sept. 1, 1939, Winton was confident he could get thousands of children out of Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia.
“If that last train had been one day earlier, it would have come through,” Winton wrote of freedom’s bitter end. “We had 250 families waiting at the Liverpool Street station that day in vain. It was an awful feeling.”
It was also the end of his own dream to rescue the children of Czechoslovakia.
Winton returned to England, served with the RAF, re-entered civilian life, raised a family, and kept a trunk of revealing documents hidden in his attic.
They weren’t discovered until 1988.
Winton didn’t even tell his wife about his activities in Czechoslovakia until he was forced to explain the documents.
Graumann believes that Winton, the son of German Jews who immigrated to England, was a pragmatic agnostic on a mission of pure humanism.
“Mr. Winton has said that he was not helping only the Jews, he was helping the endangered children of the world,” he says.
“Ninety-two percent of the children he saved were Jews, but he sought to rescue all the world’s children.”
Graumann mentions a brief exchange from the film that will be shown at the Marcus lecture.
“The rabbis challenged him and said, ‘You are taking good Jewish children and giving them to Christians to bring up, and this must stop.’
“Winton said, ‘If you think a dead Jew in Prague is better than a Jew living with a Christian family in England, that is your problem, not mine. I won’t stop.’”
