This man saved the lives of hundreds of Czechoslovakian children in 1939 and never said another word about it to anyone until 50 years later. In 1988 his wife found a scrapbook in their attic containing the documents related to his work, and decided it was a story worth telling. I never heard of him until I watched a documentary this evening called Nicky’s Family. It’s on Netflix streaming.
And best of all, he’s still alive (aged 104!) and able to accept the thanks and recognition of the people he helped.
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.
And so did mine.
This was a one year slice of Nicky’s life that he had long ago put aside and moved on. In fact, a few years earlier he’d been awarded an MBE for charity work completely unrelated to this, and had never brought it up. It turns out that the kids he saved, along with their families and offspring, now number more than 5000.
Nicky has been knighted by the queen, and received numerous other awards from both the British and Czech governments. And coolest of all IMO, he’s had a planet named after him – 19384 Winton.