Sir Nicholas George Winton

Nicholas George Wertheim was born in Hampstead, London, to German-Jewish immigrant parents who had converted to Christianity. In December 1938, as a 29-year-old stockbroker planning a skiing holiday in Switzerland, Winton received a call from his friend Martin Blake in Prague, who was assisting refugees following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. Arriving in Prague, Winton visited squalid refugee camps and realized that while the British government had agreed to admit unaccompanied refugee children from Germany and Austria under the Kindertransport, no such provision existed for Czechoslovakia.

Setting up an improvised office at his hotel dining table in Prague, Winton compiled lists of thousands of desperate families begging him to save their children. Returning to London, Winton worked by day at the Stock Exchange and by night as the head of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (Children's Section). He lobbied the Home Office for entry visas, persuaded British foster families to take in each child, and secured the mandatory £50 deposit required by the government per child.

Between March and August 1939, Winton organized eight trainloads of children departing Prague's Wilson Station, transporting 669 youngsters across Nazi Germany to the hook of Holland and onward by ferry to London Liverpool Street. A ninth train carrying 250 children was scheduled for 1 September 1939, but was canceled when Hitler invaded Poland that very morning; nearly all of those children perished in the Holocaust. Winton never spoke of his achievement until his wife Grete found his 1939 scrapbook in 1988, leading to a tearful reunion on BBC's That's Life! surrounded by the children he saved.