NEWS FEATURE: Holocaust hero reunited with those he saved, subject of documentary

c. 1998 Religion News Service PRAGUE, Czech Republic _ Nearly 60 years ago, a young British stockbroker, Nicholas Winton, arrived in Prague to help evacuate Jewish children in the months before World War II. This spring, the 90-year-old Winton returned to greet 10 of the 664 people whose young lives he saved from the Holocaust […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

PRAGUE, Czech Republic _ Nearly 60 years ago, a young British stockbroker, Nicholas Winton, arrived in Prague to help evacuate Jewish children in the months before World War II.

This spring, the 90-year-old Winton returned to greet 10 of the 664 people whose young lives he saved from the Holocaust and to cooperate in making a documentary film about his actions.”You look great!”said 75-year-old Frantisek Lebenhart of Prague as others embraced their rescuer. The survivors, though many are now grandparents, still call themselves”Winton’s children.” Winton was first reunited with his once-young charges about 10 years ago, when his heroism emerged from long obscurity.


He returned to Prague to cooperate with the making of a documentary on his deeds in 1938 and 1939, when he arranged the evacuation of mostly Jewish children from Prague while Nazi Germany was carving up Czechoslovakia.

Phil Jude of Britain and Matej Minac of the Czech Republic are producing the English-language film, which is due out next year.

The film provides an opportunity to honor”the only living Wallenberg,”said Martina Stolbova, culture administrator the Jewish Museum in Prague, which helped arrange Winoton’s visit here.

Many have compared Winton’s efforts to those of the late Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman operating in Hungary and Oskar Schindler of”Schindler’s List”fame. Both are also non-Jews who rescued many hundreds from Nazi death camps.

The film will feature interviews with survivors and scenes of their meetings with Winton. It will also show Winton revisiting such scenes as Prague’s main railway station. There, in 1939, the children were parted from their parents, most of whom would perish in the Holocaust.

Six trainloads of children left for Britain and Sweden. But Winton is still haunted by the fate of the seventh and largest transport, with 250 children, which was prevented from leaving in September 1939 after the outbreak of World War II. All the children later died in the Holocaust.”I am only sorry that we did not manage to get the last transport out,”said Winton.

Also meeting Winton on his visit was Dagmar Simova, cousin of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, herself a wartime refugee. Simova proudly recalled she was child number 298 on Winton’s list.


Vera Gissing, 70, of Great Britain, said Winton is”almost an adopted parent for us all, because most of us lost our parents in the Holocaust.” Gissing’s 1988 memoir,”Pearls of Childhood,”helped publicize Winton’s deeds, which were unknown for half a century. Now she is writing a biography of Winton.

Even Winton’s wife Greta, whom he met after the war, knew nothing of his heroism until she asked about some attic documents they found about 10 years ago.

This was because Winton called his rescue efforts a small part of a life.”I did it merely because it had to be done and nobody else was doing it,”said Winton, who has volunteered with the elderly and mentally disabled since his retirement 30 years ago.”He is like that,”said Greta Winton.”He sees a problem and he tries to solve it.” Such modesty is typical, said another of his”children.””He’s quite taken aback when anyone wants to thank him,”said Alice Klimova, 70, of Prague.

In December 1938, friends urged Winton to join them in Prague and work with refugees who had fled there.

Winton discovered the British Committee for Refugees was helping many groups, but not the children of families whose parents could not or would not leave themselves.

Bending some rules, Winton drew up letterhead for the committee’s”Children’s Division”_ which didn’t actually exist _ and falsified some of the children’s papers until they could get legitimate ones in Britain.


Winton worked tirelessly to enlist British foster families and to raise the funds needed to guarantee their permission to immigrate to Britain.

Many of the refugees attended a Czech school run by expatriates in Wales. Others took different paths. Lebenhart, then a teenager, said he lived with a wonderful foster family, endured the blitz of London, fought with a Czech unit on the Allied side and returned to post-war Prague, where he worked as a journalist and translator until retirement.

But when Lebenhart left for England in 1939, he had no idea what awaited him. He still owns a yellowed copy of an address he carried with him all those years ago: that of Nicholas Winton. If things went wrong in this strange land, he knew that was a name he could trust.”I considered him the last resort,”Lebenhart said.

DEA END SMITH

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