An unknown story for 50 years

Thanks Sybil-Ann

Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE (né Wertheim; 19 May 1909 – 1 July 2015) was a British banker and humanitarian who established an organisation to rescue children at risk from Nazi Germany. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, Winton supervised the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. Winton found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain.[1] This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for “children’s transport”).

His work went 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 several of the children he had saved. The British press celebrated him and dubbed him the “British Schindler.”[2] In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia”.[3] On 28 October 2014, he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion (1st class), by Czech President Miloš Zeman. He died in 2015 at the age of 106.

This entry was posted in History, Social justice. Bookmark the permalink.