farmdoc's blog post number 509

In 1939, due to the foresight, humanity and sheer bloody-mindedness of Nicholas Winton, then a 29-year-old British stockbroking clerk, 669 Jewish children were saved from the clutches of the Nazis. Between March and August 1939 eight trains carried to Britain the Czech children who otherwise would almost certainly have died in concentration camps [1, 2]. Last Friday, 22 of the 669 were reunited with their 100-year-old saviour – now Sir Nicholas – who’s come to be called the ‘British Schindler’ [3, 4]. To tears and applause, a steam engine that’d brought them on the re-enacted journey from Prague, pulled into the very same platform at London’s Liverpool Street Station where as virtual orphans they’d disembarked 70 years ago. Speaking to the crowd, Sir Nicholas joked: ‘It's wonderful to see you all after so many years – don’t leave it quite so long until we meet here again’. A humble man, he concealed his achievements for decades – even from his wife. And he rejected the comparison with Oskar Schindler, who saved about 1,200 Jews in the war, saying that unlike the German his actions never put him in danger. The 669 Winton Children and their descendants now total over 5,000. What a man. What a story.