08/12/2026
In 1938 Nicholas Winton, a London stockbroker, cancelled a skiing holiday and went to Prague instead.
What he found was thousands of families trying to get their children out before the German army arrived. There was no organisation doing it. So he built one — arranging trains, forging entry documents where he had to, finding British foster families and raising the money each child required to be allowed in.
He got 669 children out on eight trains.
A ninth train, carrying 250 more, was due to leave on 1 September 1939. War broke out that morning. The train never left. Almost none of those children survived.
Winton went home and did not talk about it. Not to friends. Not to his wife. For fifty years.
In 1988 she found a scrapbook in the attic with the children's names and photographs in it, and a television programme invited him on.
He sat in the front row of the audience, and the presenter asked whether anyone present owed their life to Nicholas Winton.
Everybody around him stood up.
He turned and looked at the row behind him, and then along it, and he had no idea what to do with his face.
He lived to 106.
