Nicholas Winton didn’t like to make a fuss. The British humanitarian was a modest and unassuming man, who was loth to grandstand about his achievements. The fact that he helped to save 669 children from the Holocaust was a secret he kept for many years. “If there was something that needed doing and nobody was doing it, Nicholas would step in,” says John Fieldsend. “That was the motto for his life.”
Fieldsend, 92, a retired Anglican vicar who lives in London, was one of the children Winton rescued just before the second world war broke out. Winton, a stockbroker, went to Prague in 1938 to help refugees from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), an area that had just been annexed by Germany. After seeing the awful conditions in the camps where they lived, he felt compelled to try to save the children from the threat of the Nazis. His remarkable story has now been made into a film, One Life, with Johnny Flynn and Anthony Hopkins playing the younger and older versions of Winton.
Winton formed the children’s section of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia with other volunteers and coordinated the country’s Kindertransport operation. The programme was set up by the British government in 1938, to allow unaccompanied Jewish children under 17 to stay in the UK with a foster family as long as they secured a £50 guarantee for their eventual return ticket. Evacuation efforts were up and running in Germany and Austria, but not Czechoslovakia. That is, until Winton came along. He chipped in to cover costs, dealt with the endless red tape and occasionally forged travel documents and bribed officials.
From spring 1939 until the start of the war, hundreds of children, most of them Jewish, left their parents to travel alone or with their siblings from Prague’s main train station to Liverpool Street station in London, crossing Germany and the Netherlands before taking a ferry from Hook of Holland. Each child was given an identity tag with their name and a number to hang round their neck.
“The platform was full of children, parents, babies in arms,” says Lia Lesser, 92, a former midwife based in Birmingham, who was eight when she made the journey. “Everybody was upset. I was very upset and very bewildered. My father didn’t want me to leave.” When the trains entered Germany, soldiers routinely boarded to cause disruption, leaving many kids in tears. Eva Paddock, 87, who now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was only three when she left with her older sister, Milena, who was nine. “The only thing I can remember was that I was extremely seasick on the boat and somebody gave me bananas.”
Fieldsend was picked up in Germany with his older brother, Arthur. The boys had first caught a train from Vítkov, near Opava in the Sudetenland. “Winton diverted one of his trains and picked us up in Hanover,” he says. Leaving their home town, “My mother took her wristwatch off, and said: ‘This is for you to remember us by.’ That was a big shock to me – I didn’t know what to make of it.”
For some children, who were unaware of the high stakes involved, the trip started out as a more lighthearted experience. “I had pictures of where I was going and the people I was meeting. They had a picture of me,” says Renate Collins, 90, who left when she was six. Her family had already exchanged a few letters with her foster parents, a reverend and his wife from the Rhondda valley in south Wales. “I probably thought I was having a nice holiday.” Peter Schiller, 92, a retired doctor and psychotherapist who lives in London, says: “I didn’t think it was scary because it was quite an adventure for a seven-year-old to be put on a train and sent off to an unknown destination.”
There were nine trains in total but the last one, carrying 250 children, the largest group, never arrived. It was due to depart on 1 September 1939 but that day Hitler invaded Poland and Germany closed its borders. Most of the children on board are believed to have died in concentration camps.
Many of the children who reached the UK never saw their parents again. Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust; in concentration camps, extermination camps and elsewhere. Collins was adopted by her foster parents and went on to work for the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Her father and uncle died in Auschwitz, and she was told her mother and grandmother were killed in Treblinka. She heard the news of her parents’ deaths when she was 12. “I was very shocked,” she says, “but, in the back of my mind, I didn’t really want to go back to Prague. I wanted them to be alive, but I didn’t want to go back.”
“My father starved to death in Auschwitz and my mother died in a concentration camp,” says Lesser, who was adopted by a schoolteacher in Anglesey. Fieldsend has spent years trying to find out what happened to his parents although he believes they probably died in Auschwitz. “Most of my close family died in the various camps. Obviously, it’s painful. One of the things one has to battle through is anger and pain and learning the task of forgiveness, which I think, eventually, I have achieved.” He was taken in by a family from Sheffield: “I’ve had a very good life in this country.”
A few children were happily reunited with their families. Paddock’s mother and father made it to England separately. The family ended up living in a council flat just down the road from her foster parents, a local Labour party secretary and his wife, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. “The Radcliffes helped my mother learn English and were part of our lives until they died,” Paddock says. They attended her wedding in 1955. “They were loving, adoring foster parents.”
The first time most of the children heard of Winton and his role in their escape from the Nazis was in was in 1988, when the BBC covered his heroic achievement in two episodes of the television show That’s Life. In a now famous clip from the second episode, the unsuspecting Winton is seated in the audience with his wife, Grete, as the host Esther Rantzen asks: “Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?” He is visibly shocked when most of the audience stands up.
Even the other people in the audience had no idea that they were surrounded by fellow Kindertransport children. They had been invited to the show after an appeal asking people who had been saved by Winton to get in touch with the That’s Life team. “We’d each been invited to the programme by Esther but we had no idea how many of us there would be,” says Fieldsend. “Just meeting one another after the programme was over was a really wonderful experience.”
Until then, Winton had not talked about his part in the rescue of these children for nearly 50 years. Even his wife, Grete, knew nothing about it until she found an old scrapbook of her husband’s in their attic in 1988. It was stuffed with photographs, letters from the families and names of the children he had saved. Only then did he reveal what he had done.
She gave the scrapbook to Elisabeth Maxwell, a Holocaust researcher, who was married to the newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell. When Robert heard about Winton, he ran an article in the Sunday People, which led to the That’s Life special. Winton was dubbed “Britain’s Schindler” by the press, in reference to the German businessman Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust.
Eva Paddock saw That’s Life and contacted Winton. “I wrote and said we’d like to come to Maidenhead for a cup of tea. His response was: ‘Nobody comes for a cup of tea. You come for the day.’ So my husband and I spent a wonderful day with him and Grete.” In the garden alone with Winton after lunch, Paddock tried to thank him for everything he had done. “He wasn’t very interested in being thanked. He was interested in what my life had become. That’s who he was.”
Being able to see Winton in person gave the grownup children “a very real sense of closure, especially for the people who never did see their parents again. He actually became everybody’s grandfather,” she says.
He became close to many of them, and the group called themselves “Winton’s children”. Some became friends until his death in 2015 at the age of 106. Fieldsend kept in touch after meeting Winton at That’s Life. “My wife and I used to go to see him quite often to have coffee and a chat. We went out for meals. He loved the Maidenhead Harvester. Winton was guest of honour at our golden wedding anniversary. It was a real privilege to give a small token of thanks.”
Winton’s daughter, Barbara, also organised gatherings for the Kindertransport children, which Schiller attended: “He was probably one of the most introverted people I had met in my life. He was certainly an incredibly impressive man but not one that wanted to talk about it.”
Winton was finally honoured for his Kindertransport work when he was knighted in 2003 for services to humanity. In 2009, a private passenger train named the Winton travelled from Prague to London, following the original Kindertransport route, as a tribute to Winton. Lesser brought one of her daughters to meet the train. “He loved helping people,” she says. “It was something that came naturally to him.” A statue of Winton protectively looking after two children, one clutching his neck, stands proudly in Prague’s main railway station.
But his lasting legacy is the many lives he saved, including Lord (Alfred) Dubs, the Labour peer and former MP, immunologist Leslie Baruch Brent, the poet Gerda Mayer, the film-maker Karel Reisz and Paddock’s sister, Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines. “I owe him three children, three grandchildren, a great-grandchild and a new one about to arrive,” says Paddock. “None of that would have happened without him. He was an amazing man – how many families would not be here to tell the tale otherwise?”
“I am alive due to his benevolence and caring for the world,” says Schiller. “I have three kids and seven grandchildren so I made quite a full life for myself.”
Lesser says: “If I hadn’t gone on the transport, I would have been killed with my mother.” Collins gives talks about her life story and was awarded the British Empire Medal in 2020 for services to Holocaust education. “I’m very grateful to this country. Nobody else wanted us. But Britain took us in.”
Some of the children have found ways of their own to honour Winton. “One of my grandchildren is named Nicholas and one of my great-grandchildren is called Arthur Winton,” says Fieldsend. Have they been told about what Winton did for him yet? “They are still too young to know the story – but they will be told.”
• One Life will be released on 1 January in UK and Irish cinemas.
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