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Sir Nicholas Winton

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May 21, 2015

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Sir Nicholas Winton is a personality that very few of us know about. He is not a famous artist or a writer who we could come across everyday in our education or current affairs. However, he is a person of great honour and a true humanitarian; anyone with an interest in social issues or human rights issues would be familiar with his groundbreaking achievements.

Sir Nicholas George Wertheim was born in the year 1909 in London, UK. He was born into a German Jewish family who had moved to London two years prior to his birth. They changed their religion to Christianity in an attempt to completely adapt to situation of London at the time and had also adopted the family name Winton. After completing his education, Winton became a stock broker at the London Stock Exchange. He also became an active member of the Labour Party (UK) where he started to diligently work for social issues such as the oppression imposed by the Nazi Germans.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of Sir Winton was that he single-handedly rescued 669 Jewish children from the Nazis. In 1938, a friend of Winton by the name of Martin Blake had asked him to visit him the German dominant Czechoslovakia. Winton had been visiting the refugee camps around Prague, Czech Republic when he decided to help the children by giving them a home and a British permit. He returned to London to fund a rescue mission and transportation wherein the children would be safely transported to a foster home. Having done that, Winton also had to look for British families who would be willing to take care of these children, and fortunately, there were many families who were willing to adopt.

In March 1939, the first plane of these rescued children flew out to London from Prague. This followed by seven more rescue missions by trains and some by ships. However, the rescue missions arranged by Winton did not come into light until 1988 when his wife found a scrapbook that documented the details of all the children who had been transported to England.

In 2002, Sir Nicholas Winton was knighted in the New Year Honours for his rescue mission on the Czech Kindersport. He was also appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1983 Queen’s Birthday Honours for establishing elderly homes, Abbeyfields in Britain, along with a number of other honours.

Remember in the first part of the movie The Chronicles of Narnia where Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy go off to live with the old man in Britain because of the war? It is plausible that Sir Nicholas Winton arranged for that rescue mission as well.