The Man Who Saved 669 Children

The story of Nicholas Winton is one of the most profound tales of humanitarianism that you’ve probably never heard.

Nicholas Winton organised mass evacuations of children to help them avoid being sent to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps is having a world premiere in Prague, the Czech capital.

Nicholas Winton arranged eight trains to carry 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia through Germany to Britain at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

An article in the The Huffington Post says:

In December 1938, Winton gave up a vacation as a London-based stockbroker to travel to politically turbulent Prague, according to the Guardian. He was curious to see firsthand what was happening to refugees in what was then Czechoslovakia. Nazis had recently invaded the country, and Winton sensed the grave danger refugees there were facing.

He created advertisements for foster homes. He manipulated paperwork to sidestep government red tape that would have gotten in his way, CBS News reported. He even persuaded Germans to go along with his plan. Continuing his efforts from his home in London for the next nine months, Winton coordinated eight train evacuations of 669 children from Czechoslovakia to Britain, saving them from almost certain death.

Winton himself was so modest he didn’t even tell his wife what he had done. He felt he had done many things since then that were more meaningful to him.

For decades, Winton’s heroic efforts largely went unnoticed — until 1988, when a BBC program surprised him by planning an emotional reunion with several of the survivors he saved.

When the war started he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and was evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk during the Allied retreat. He later returned to France as a Royal Air Force pilot.

After the war, he worked for various international organizations, among them the International Refugee Organization and the U.S. Marshall Plan, which helped fund the recovery of Western Europe from the ravages of the war.

In the 1950s, as a family man, he returned to the business world. But he never gave up on his good works. He helped establish Abbeyfield, a giant charity that runs hundreds of homes for the elderly throughout the UK.

Original Article