If Nicholas Winton had his way, no one except 669 Jewish children in WW II would have known about his successful efforts to set them free from certain death. He kept his wife in the dark as well — for 50 years.
Winton simply chose to do the right thing, which made him a rarity in an era of unprecedented brutality and moral cowardice. He just didn’t talk about it.
In the late 1980s, Grete Winton accidentally found a scrapbook in their attic containing photographs of children, letters and detailed evacuation notices. Winton reluctantly shared his past. Several conversations later, Grete convinced her husband to go public.
Otherwise, the modest, mild-mannered British stockbroker might have gone to his grave on July 1, 2015 at the age of 106 without public acknowledgement of his incredible humanity.
Winton went to Prague in 1939 to visit friends involved in Jewish refugee work. Just 29, he was overwhelmed. Jewish refugees packing the city were forced to live in squalid camps. Winton launched the Czech Kindertransport at a dining room table in his hotel room. Parents stood outside, beggin him to save their children.
When Winton returned home to Britain, he worked at the Stock Exchange by day and devoted the rest of his time to arranging the children’s escape to Britain.
Remember, immigration restrictions were cruelly strict, especially in the US. The UK’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain turned a deaf ear to his countrymen’s cries to permit 10,000 children to leave Germany for Palestine, then under British rule. But Kristallnacht — Nov. 9-10, 1938 — convinced Chamberlain to act. He agreed to Kindertransports, allowing 9,000 Jewish children to enter Britain.
Winton took it a covert step further, battling British bureaucracy and obtaining funds. In a nine-month period, he managed to rescue 669 children. His contemporaries called him a buccaneer.
Thomas Graumann, one of “Winton’s Children,” was interviewed by the IJN on Jan. 12, 2009. Graumann, who spoke at the Fred Marcus Holocaust Memorial Lecture, was eight when he departed Prague on the second to last train bound for England on Sept. 1, 1939 — the day Hitler invaded Poland.
A few hours later, Hitler closed the Czech borders. The last and largest train carrying 250 Jewish children never made it out of Prague. No one saw those children again.
Graumann, sent to live with an elderly woman in Scotland, eventually converted to Christianity.
Nicholas Winton was born Nicholas Wertheim to German-Jewish parents who rejected Judaism. Raised as a Christian, Winton lost his faith and started thinking about his Jewish ancestry. “When I set out to try and bring children from Czechoslovakia,” he later said, “I didn’t do it because they were Jewish children. I did it because they were children.”
Upon the release of the documentary, “Nicholas J. Winton: The Power of Good” in 2002, speaking engagements took up all of Winton’s diminishing time. Even at 103, his energy seemed boundless. Those of us admiring from a distance knew this could not continue. He knew it too.
Thomas Gray, in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” penned what could have been Nicholas Winton’s final testament:
“Full many a flower was born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Mr. Winton, you would no doubt sleep contentedly under that inscription.
But the 669 Jewish children you rescued from the Holocaust, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, cannot let you rest. They are too busy disturbing your quiet ground with gratitude and love.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
