Sir Nicholas Winton, whose heroism saved hundreds of children from death in the Holocaust, has died at the age of 106.
The hero behind the Prague Kindertransports, which brought 669 Jewish children to the UK, died of respiratory failure in Wexham Hospital in Slough yesterday morning.
Born in Hampstead to German Jewish immigrants who had converted to Christianity, Winton left school with no qualifications. After enrolling at night school, he worked as a broker on the London Stock Exchange. In 1938, when Winton was 29, a phone call from Martin Blake, a friend and fellow socialist, dramatically altered the course of his life. Blake asked Winton to cancel his planned skiing holiday and go to Czechoslovakia to help Jewish refugees.
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Winton set up an office in a Prague hotel room, from where he cajoled the Home Office to accept refugees and help obtain their safe passage through Europe. With help from his mother, he set about finding foster homes in the UK, thereby satisfying the government stipulation that young refugees must have a guaranteed place to live. Winton finally obtained permission to start evacuating children from Prague to the UK, as part of the Kindertransports programme, which rescued around 10,000 Jewish children from all over Europe.
After three weeks in Prague, Winton returned to London, where he combined his day job with evenings spent finding homes for the incoming refugees. Over the following nine months, eight train-loads of Jewish children arrived in the UK. In a bitter parting blow, the invasion of Poland and subsequent closure of the Czech border meant a ninth train never made it out of Prague – the children on board are believed to have perished in the Holocaust. In all, 669 children were able to escape the shadow of Nazi oppression and start new lives in Britain thanks to Winton and his colleagues.
Described as a naturally humble character, Winton rarely mentioned his involvement with the Kindertransport after the war, according to reports. Instead, he settled in Maidenhead with his Danish wife, Grete, and worked in the finance departments of several companies while bringing up their three children. His daughter, Barbara, recalled that her father never appeared particularly ambitious and seemed content with a quiet middle-class life.
His extraordinary wartime activities only came to light in 1988, when his wife showed a scrapbook containing detailed profiles of the rescued children to Holocaust researcher Elisabeth Maxwell. Her husband, newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, commissioned a profile of Winton that appeared in the Sunday People.
From there, Winton's heroism became recognised on a national level thanks to a memorable appearance on the TV show That's Life!. After its host Esther Rantzen had paid fulsome tribute to Winton, who was sitting in the audience, dozens of fellow audience members got to their feet and revealed that they were "Winton children".
For the rest of his life, Winton enjoyed – somewhat reluctantly – the status of national hero. In 2003, he was knighted in the Queen's honours List and in 2009 a statue of him was unveiled at Prague train station.
Ever modest, he consistently played down his role in the Kindertransport. Instead, he emphasised the bravery of his colleagues Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner, who risked their lives by staying in Prague to oversee the operation under the noses of the Gestapo. "I wasn't heroic because I was never in danger," he told The Guardian last year. "It turned out to be remarkable, but it didn't seem remarkable when I did it."
