Nicholas Winton died Wednesday at the age of 106. When he was just a 29-year-old English stockbroker, Winton helped organize the rescue of 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia at the dawn of World War II.
Sir Nick Winton has died. He saved over 600 Czech Jewish children. One was my Dad. Take a moment to pay tribute to a modest but great man
— Simon Wessely (@WesselyS) July 1, 2015
Even today, not all of “Winton’s Children” know about the man’s role in their lives. A Web site set up by Winton’s family includes a list of the more than 300 children who still haven’t been found. Many of those aware of Winton only discovered the story as adults when Esther Rantzen’s BBC program “That’s Life!” aired in the 1980s.
Here are some of their stories:
Alfred Dubs boarded the train in Prague when he was just 6. “It was a traumatic parting,” he told the Times & Star in 2011. “For the older children, who knew what was happening, I expect it would be even more traumatic. For me it was bewildering.”
His father had already made it to Britain, but soon after his mother joined them, Dubs’s father died of a heart attack.
Dubs developed an early interest in politics and eventually became a British member of parliament. “I was trying to work out what had happened to me and came to the conclusion that if evil can cause so much harm perhaps other people could reverse the harm,” he told Times & Star.
Dubs called Winton “a great man” and “without him it is pretty unlikely that I would have survived. I had to assume that what happened to my uncle and aunt would have happened to me.”
John Fieldsend, saved by that train ride at the age of 7, was taken in by a family and eventually became a Anglican vicar. He received a letter from his parents in 1946, just after the war ended, Fieldsend told BBC Radio last month.
“When you receive this letter the war will be over… we want to say farewell to you – to our dearest possession in the world, and only for a short time were we able to keep you,” Fieldsend’s mother wrote. The letter detailed family members who had died, and his father wrote, “We are going into the unknown with the hope that we shall yet see you again when God wills. Don’t forget us and be good. I too thank all the good people who have accepted you so nobly.”
Fieldsend told BBC Radio, “It’s a fantastic letter. What wonderful parents I had.”
Vera Gissing, who left Prague, just before she turned 11, with her sister, told the Telegraph in 2013 that the scene of her departure “will be with me forever.”
“The forced cheerfulness of my parents – their last words of love, encouragement and advice,” Gissing recalled. “Until that moment, I felt more excited than afraid, but when the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my beloved mother and father could no longer mask their anguish.”
Gissing’s mother was sent to a concentration camp and died soon after the war. Gissing went on to become a writer who penned a biography of Winton. “I think all the children who were saved owe their lives to Nicholas Winton,” she told the BBC in 2009. “I don’t think that many of us would have survived somehow, because nearly all of us lost our families.”
Milena Grenfell-Baine left Prague as a 9-year-old and was taken in by a family near Manchester until her family was reunited a year later.
“None of us knew who in fact was responsible for helping us to get onto those trains,” she told BBC Radio. “And we discovered 40 years later that it was a man called Nicholas Winton.”
She went on to marry architect George Grenfell-Baines and became Lady Grenfell-Baines when her husband was knighted. She served as an interpreter for Czech soccer teams and worked with various charities.
She told the Lancashire Evening Post in 2014, “You can never praise him enough for what he did really. We can never be thankful enough. If he didn’t do what he did we wouldn’t be here.”
Lia Lesser described the scene at the train station to BBC Radio this way: “We didn’t know we wouldn’t see our parents again. I think they must have known there was a good chance they wouldn’t see us again, and they were very brave to let us go.” She carried with her two suitcases of clothes, a Czech storybook, and a pendant with a picture of Moses and the Ten Commandments, she told the radio service.
A family on the Isle of Anglesey took her in. She was able to exchange letters with her parents, via the Red Cross, until the correspondence stopped. “I think that’s when they were in Auschwitz,” Lesser told BBC Radio. The war ended, and she discovered they had died.
In 1988, Lesser watched the “That’s Life!” show from home. “I just thought it was amazing that a single human being could save 669 children and nobody knew about it,” she told BBC Radio. “Nicky, I am so proud to be one of your very many children.”
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