[Ha'aretz] Yehuda Lahav and Nir Hasson - Nicholas Winton was a 30-year-old British stockbroker in the summer of 1939, and had been planning to spend his vacation in Switzerland. But when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March of that year, he traveled to Prague instead. Winton was not Jewish; there were few Jews among his friends and acquaintances. He simply felt an obligation to help people in trouble. At his own initiative (and at first, at his own expense), Winton founded an organization to assist children from Czechoslovakia to find homes with British families, most of them Jews. During the course of that summer, 669 children arrived in England. Many of their parents died in Auschwitz. Seventy years after the outbreak of the war, a memorial train set out from Prague to London along the 1,300-km. route traveled by the children. The survivors and their families now number 5,000 people, 240 of whom are on the train. When they arrive in London, they will be greeted by Sir Winton himself, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday. Winton considered the rescue project so natural that he never bothered to mention it, even to his wife Grete. His activity came to light only 50 years later when she found an old suitcase in the attic with a scrapbook from the war years that included a list of the 669 rescued children.
2009-09-04 08:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive