Nicholas Winton: The British Stockbroker Who Saved 669 Children — Then Told No One for Fifty Years

Nicholas Winton was twenty-nine years old, had a comfortable job at the London Stock Exchange, and had planned a ski vacation in Switzerland for Christmas 1938. Then a friend called from Prague and described what was happening to Jewish families in the Sudetenland following the Munich Agreement. Winton canceled the ski trip.

He arrived in Prague in early January 1939 and set up an office at a dining room table in the Hotel Šroubek. He had no official mandate, no government backing, no organization behind him. He had business cards printed that read "British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Children's Section" — an organization that he had essentially invented. He then began finding Jewish families who wanted their children evacuated to Britain, finding British families willing to take those children, and assembling the documentation to make it happen.

What He Built in Eight Months

Between March and August 1939, working from London after his initial Prague visit, Winton organized eight trains from Prague to London Liverpool Street station. He managed the British Home Office, negotiated guarantees of fifty pounds sterling per child (a deposit to cover potential repatriation costs), found foster families, processed paperwork, and wrote personally to the heads of government of multiple countries seeking their cooperation.

He moved 669 children on those eight trains.

The ninth train was scheduled to depart Prague on September 1, 1939. It was the largest single transport he had organized, carrying 250 children. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. All German-controlled borders closed within hours. The train never left the station. The 250 children on it were, in almost every case, later killed.

Winton did not speak of what he had done. He returned to London. He fought in the war. He built a career, married, had children. For fifty years, his wife Grete — to whom he had been married since 1948 — had no idea that her husband had saved 669 lives before she met him.

The Scrapbook in the Attic

In 1988, Grete Winton was clearing out the attic of their house in Maidenhead when she found an old leather scrapbook. Inside were lists of children's names, transport manifests, photographs, letters of thanks. She did not know what it was. She showed it to a researcher who recognized what it represented.

The producer of the BBC television program "That's Life!" contacted Winton and arranged for him to appear as an audience member. He was 79 years old and, he was told, there was simply an interesting story they wanted to discuss with him. He sat in the studio audience, unsuspecting.

Esther Rantzen, presenting the program, invited him to stand and asked if anyone in the audience knew him. A woman in her fifties stood. Then another. Then another. The BBC had discreetly assembled dozens of the children Winton had saved — now middle-aged adults with children and grandchildren of their own — and they had brought them to the studio without telling him.

Archival footage of that moment shows Nicholas Winton sitting in his seat, looking around the room at the standing faces, and beginning to cry. He had not known any of them were alive. He had spent fifty years not knowing.

He was put in the audience at a second taping. The same thing happened: all around him, people who were alive because of him stood and would not let him look away from what he had done.

Nicholas Winton was knighted in 2003. He lived to 106. He is sometimes called "the British Schindler," which understates it: Schindler had an organization, a factory, resources, connections. Winton had a dining room table and business cards he had printed himself.