A British Stockbroker Saved 669 Children and Kept It Secret for 50 Years
In late 1938, 29-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas Winton canceled a Swiss ski vacation after learning about refugee camps in Czechoslovakia. Working from a Prague hotel room, he organized eight train transports to evacuate 669 predominantly Jewish children to safety in Great Britain before the Nazi invasion closed the borders. Winton never told his friends or family; his wife only uncovered his handwritten records in their attic nearly fifty years later.
A Canceled Ski Trip to Switzerland
In December 1938, Nicholas Winton was a 29-year-old clerk on the London Stock Exchange preparing for a winter holiday in the Swiss Alps. Just before his departure, he received a telephone call from a friend named Martin Blake, who was working with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Blake urged Winton to abandon his skiing trip and travel immediately to Prague instead. Winton agreed, arriving in a city overwhelmed by a humanitarian crisis following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain, France, and Italy had permitted Nazi Germany to annex Czechoslovakia's border regions, the Sudetenland.
Upon arriving in Prague, Winton visited makeshift refugee camps where tens of thousands of people, including many Jews and political dissidents, were living in freezing, destitute conditions. While several international and local aid workers were attempting to arrange relief and emigration for adult refugees, Winton noticed that almost no organized effort existed to evacuate unaccompanied children. Seeing the imminent threat of further German aggression against the rest of Czechoslovakia, he decided to establish an ad hoc children's rescue operation before borders closed entirely.
Operating initially out of his room at the Hotel Šroubek in Wenceslas Square, Winton began registering names of children whose parents were desperate to send them abroad. News of the Englishman's initiative spread rapidly among terrified families. Long lines formed outside his hotel and, later, an office in central Prague, with hundreds of parents seeking a way to get their sons and daughters to safety.