Who was Nicholas Winton, the English Schindler whose story is told in the film One Life with Anthony Hopkins

The story of Nicholas Winton became known to the general public one day in 1988. A film tells it, One life, starring Anthony Hopkins. That day in 1988, Nicholas Winton, almost eighty years old, was in the television studio of the program That’s Life! of the BBC. He was in the audience, but he didn’t know that, around him, there were some of the children he had saved in 1939. This is the last act of a story that begins in the years of the Second World War in Czechoslovakia.

During the nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, 10,000 Jewish children and young people aged 17 and under were brought from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia to the United Kingdom as refugees. He was called Kindertransport and the children were granted temporary visas with the agreement that, once safe, they would return to their families. Children who were already in foster care went straight to London, those who didn’t were put up in hostels across the country. They were in a foreign country, whose language they did not know and without their families.

The first landing on the British coast was dated 2 December 1938 in Harwich, Essex. The boat was carrying 196 children who could only carry a small suitcase and a small sum of money. They arrive at the departure ports by train. They were given an identity card as an identification document. Many of them would have seen their parents for the last time at that departure. The last train left Berlin on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.

Nicholas Winton, later to become Sir, was one of the souls of the Kinderstransport. He was a young banker born to German Jewish parents who emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. Instead of going on holiday to Switzerland, he went to Prague just before Christmas 1938. He had been contacted by a friend, Martin Blake, who was in Prague on behalf of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Blake had asked if Nicholas could come help with the growing humanitarian crisis going on in Czechoslovakia.

He was shocked by what he saw. Many Jewish families were in refugee camps, in increasingly difficult conditions as winter approached. He invented a plan to help children following the motto: “If something is not impossible, then there is always a way to achieve it.”

Together with Blake and other colleagues, he set up a base of operations from his hotel room in Prague. Families wishing to send their children to Britain began registering their names with Nicholas and his team. He organized the safe transportation of children across Nazi Germany and Europe and also through the enormous bureaucracy of the British authorities. The London government allowed entry only to the most vulnerable children and each one had to already have an insured foster family before departure. Back in London he placed advertisements in the newspapers looking for volunteers to take in the children. He found the families and sent the children away in March 1938.

In the end, Nicholas Winton helped save the lives of 669 childrenthough he would always remember those he couldn’t save. «I don’t think about the children who came, but about the children who should have come and didn’t come», he said in an interview with the BBC. His full commitment to saving children became known only much later. It was only when his family found a book in their attic that listed the names of all the children Nicholas had managed to save that his story finally came to light.

In 2003 he was knighted by the Queen and in 2014 he received the Czech Republic’s highest honour, the Order of the White Lion. Sir Nicholas Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106. The film One Lifewhich tells his story, stars Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter and is based on book with the same title published in Italy by Garzanti. The author is Barbara Winton, daughter of Nicholas and Grete, who continued her father’s work supporting refugee children through the Sir Nicholas Winton Memorial Trust, to ensure that Nicholas’s life inspired others to do good.