JREF : Sir Nicholas Winton has Died...

jeudi 2 juillet 2015

Sir Nicholas Winton has Died...

..and most of you, I gather (the Brits among us may know his story), are wondering who?

He died at the age of 106, which is noteworthy in itself, but it is what he did in a few months of that long life that makes his death worth mentioning.

Quoted from a post on the Straight Dope Forums by Boyo Jim:

Quote:

In 1938 Nicky was a British stockbroker planning a ski trip to Switzerland when his ski buddy called and bailed out of the trip. His friend was in Prague and had been swept up in assisting Czech refugees, mainly Jews, who were threatened by the recent Nazi occupation. Nicky decided to go to Prague and help his friend.

When he got there he was a bit overwhelmed, but decided to carve off a little piece of the problem and make it his own -- saving the children. He opened up an "office" in the dining room of the hotel he was in, and with 3 friends formed the British Committee for Refugees From Czechoslovakia, dubbed himself the Honorary Secretary for the "Children's Section", and got to work.

He collected names of parents who wanted to get their children out of the country even if unable to accompany them. Almost none of these parents survived the war. He collected the name and a photograph of every child, eventually compiling a list of some 2,000.

He started writing letters to governments all over the world looking for countries who would take unaccompanied child refugees. He only found one -- Great Britain. And there were conditions -- he had to find a family to sponsor and host each child, and post a 50 pound bond for each. He also had to negotiate passage through other countries, including Germany itself and the Netherlands, to build a route for the refugees to travel. He returned to England to build the necessary organization and raise the necessary money to do it.

And somehow he did. He found the money and sponsor families for more than 600 children and brought them to London. He marketed the kids like a product -- he produced post cards with the pictures of half a dozen kids on each and let the prospective sponsors shuffle through them to pick out who they wanted. He also did some checking (what I've learned so far is sketchy on detail) to vet the sponsors and offer some assurance to parents and children they weren't to be consigned to slave labor or a hellhole.

Several "shipments" of the kids came through with little trouble, until the one scheduled to leave Prague on September 1, 1939. War in Poland broke out, the Germans sealed the border and stopped the train from loading. Almost all of the kids who gathered for that final train were later killed in the concentration camps.

And that was the end of it. Nicky packed away his documents, joined the RAF, and by his own account never gave much more thought to it until his wife found his documents and started asking questions. And he told her the story.

And his wife got the documents into the hands of a BBC producer who recognized a great story when she heard it. And she had the list of all the children who made it to England, and had the brilliant idea of seeking them out. She reached about a hundred, most of whom had never heard of Nicky and never known how they had got out of Czechoslovakia when almost no one else in their family survived.

And then the BBC pulled off a version of This is Your Life on Nicky, called That's Life. They got him into a TV studio audience on some pretense, and most of the rest of the audience was made up of the now adult children who he'd gotten out of Czechoslovakia. And soon it dawned on him that this program was about him, and all those people were there to meet him and thank him, and his tears began to flow.

Here's a little bit of that show.

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE