Nicholas Winton


Sir Nicholas George Winton was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue refugee children, mostly Jewish, whose families had fled persecution by Nazi Germany. Born to German-Jewish parents who had immigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, Winton assisted in the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War. On a brief visit to Czechoslovakia, he helped compile a list of children in danger and, returning to Britain, he worked to fulfill the legal requirements of bringing the children to Britain and finding homes and sponsors for them.
This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport.
His humanitarian accomplishments remained unknown and unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years until 1988 when he was invited to the BBC television programme That's Life!, where he was reunited with dozens of the children he had helped come to Britain and was introduced to many of their children and grandchildren. The British press celebrated him and dubbed him the "British Schindler". In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia". In 2014, he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion, by Czech President Miloš Zeman. Winton died in 2015, aged 106.

Early life

Winton was born on 19 May 1909 in Hampstead, London, to Jewish parents Rudolph Wertheim, a bank manager, and Barbara, as the middle of three children. His elder sister was Charlotte and his younger brother was Robert. His parents were German Jews who had moved to London two years earlier. The family name was Wertheim, but they changed it to Winton in an effort at integration. They also converted to Christianity, and Winton was baptised. His mother was the sister of the psychiatrists Fredric Wertham and Ida Macalpine.
In 1923, Winton entered Stowe School, which had just opened. He left without qualifications, attending night school while volunteering at the Midland Bank. He then went to Hamburg, where he worked at Behrens Bank, followed by Wasserman Bank in Berlin. In 1931, he moved to France and worked for the Banque Nationale de Crédit in Paris. He also earned a banking qualification in France. Returning to London, he became a broker at the London Stock Exchange. Though a stockbroker, Winton was also "an ardent socialist who became close to Labour Party luminaries Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee and Tom Driberg". Through another socialist friend, Martin Blake, Winton became part of a left-wing circle opposed to appeasement and concerned about the dangers posed by the Nazis.
At school, he had become an outstanding fencer, fencing both foil and épée, and was selected for the British team in 1938. He had hoped to compete in the 1940 Olympics, but the games were cancelled because of the Second World War.

Rescue work

Shortly before Christmas 1938, Winton was planning to travel to Switzerland for a skiing holiday. Following a call for help from Marie Schmolka and Doreen Warriner, he decided instead to visit Prague and help Martin Blake, who was in Prague as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, then in the process of being occupied by Germany, and had called Winton to ask him to assist in Jewish welfare work. Alongside the Czechoslovak Refugee Committee, the British and Canadian volunteers such as Winton, Trevor Chadwick, and Beatrice Wellington worked in organising to aid children from families at risk from the Nazis. Many of them set up their office at a dining room table in a hotel in Wenceslas Square. Altogether, Winton spent three weeks in Prague and left in January 1939, two months before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Other foreign volunteers remained, such as Chadwick, Warriner and Wellington. In November 1938, following Kristallnacht in Nazi-ruled Germany, the House of Commons approved a measure to allow the entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a warranty of was deposited per person for their eventual return to their own country.

Netherlands

An important obstacle was getting official permission to cross into the Netherlands, as the children were to embark on the ferry at The Hook of Holland. Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Dutch government officially closed its borders to any Jewish refugees. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee searched for them and returned any found to Germany, despite the horrors of Kristallnacht being well known.
Winton succeeded, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. Following the first train-full of refugees to the Netherlands, escorted by Quaker Tessa Rowntree, the process of crossing went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother worked with him to place the children in homes and later hostels. Throughout the summer of 1939, he placed photographs of the children in Picture Post seeking families to accept them. By coincidence, the names of the London and North Eastern Railway steamers which operated the Harwich to The Hook of Holland route included the and the ; the former can be seen in a 1938 Pathé Newsreel.
He also wrote to U.S. politicians such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking them to take more children. He said that two thousand more might have been saved if they had helped, but only Sweden took any besides those sent to Britain. The last group of children, scheduled to leave Prague on 1 September 1939, was unable to depart. With Hitler's invasion of Poland on the same day, the Second World War had begun. Of the 250 children due to leave on that train, only two survived the war.
Winton acknowledged the vital roles in Prague of Doreen Warriner, Trevor Chadwick, Nicholas Stopford, Beatrice Wellington, Josephine Pike and Bill Barazetti, who were the people who organized the evacuation of refugees, including the children, from Czechoslovakia. Winton stayed in Prague only about three weeks and left before the Nazis occupied the country. He never set foot in the Prague main railway station, although a statue of him is erected there. He later wrote that Chadwick "then went to work and dealt with all the considerable problems at the Prague end and this work he continued to carry on even when it became difficult and dangerous when the Germans arrived. He deserves all praise".

Notable people saved

Of the 669 children saved from the Holocaust through Winton's efforts, more than 370 have never been traced. BBC News suggested in 2015 that they may not know the full story of how they survived the war.

Second World War

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Winton initially declined to be conscripted into the British Army, applying successfully for registration as a conscientious objector. He served with an Air Raid Precautions section and a British Red Cross ambulance unit.
In 1940, he rescinded his objections and joined the Royal Air Force, Administrative and Special Duties Branch. Initially he was an aircraftman, rising to sergeant and on 22 June 1944 he was commissioned as an acting pilot officer on probation. On 17 August 1944, he was promoted to pilot officer on probation.
He was promoted to the war substantive rank of flying officer on 17 February 1945, staying in the Air Force after the war. He relinquished his commission on 19 May 1954, retaining the honorary rank of flight lieutenant.

Postwar

Family life

Following the war, Winton worked for the International Refugee Organization and then the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in Paris, where he met Grete Gjelstrup, a Danish secretary and accountant's daughter. They married in her hometown of Vejle on 31 October 1948.
They had three children: two sons, named Nicholas Jr. and Robin, and a daughter named Barbara. Their younger son Robin had Down's syndrome. The family insisted that Robin would stay with them rather than go to a residential home as was the norm at the time. Robin's death from meningitis on the day before his sixth birthday affected Winton greatly and he founded a local support organisation which became Maidenhead Mencap. Winton stood, unsuccessfully, for the town council in 1954; he later found work in the finance departments of various companies.

Recognition

Winton mentioned his humanitarian accomplishments in his election material while unsuccessfully standing for election to the Maidenhead town council in 1954. Otherwise, he went unnoticed for half a century until in 1988 his wife found a detailed scrapbook in their attic, containing lists of the children, including their parents' names and the names and addresses of the families that took them in. He gave the scrapbook to Elisabeth Maxwell, a Holocaust researcher and wife of media magnate Robert Maxwell. Letters were sent to each of these known addresses and 80 of "Winton's children" were found in Britain.
In a 2017 interview on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific, Simon Wessely described how his father Rudi, one of the rescued children, had a chance encounter with Winton.
The wider world found out about his work in February 1988 during an episode of the BBC television programme That's Life! when he was invited as a member of the audience. At one point, Winton's scrapbook was shown and his achievements were explained. The host of the programme, Esther Rantzen, introduced Winton to children he had helped to rescue, including Vera Gissen.
In a later, follow-up That's Life! programme at which Winton was also in the audience, Rantzen asked whether anybody in the audience was among the children who owed their lives to Winton, and if so, to stand: more than two dozen people surrounding Winton rose and applauded. Rantzen then asked if anyone present was the child or grandchild of one of the children Winton saved, and the rest of the audience stood.
He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2003 when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at Winton House, an Abbeyfield Society care home in Windsor, Berkshire, named in his honour.
By the time Winton's work became known in 1988, most of the people who had worked in the kindertransport in Czechoslovakia had died unrecognised. Despite widespread praise for his work, two scholars have attempted to highlight that his accomplishments were a group effort, writing about the situation "... We should not reduce the account to just one saint."
Winton and his brother Robert started an inter-regional fencing competition in 1950. The Winton Cup continued and celebrated its belated 70th anniversary in 2022 due to postponements during the COVID-19 pandemic. His children and grandchildren make regular guest appearances each year.