Sir Nicholas Winton, who has died aged 106, became known belatedly as “the British Schindler” for his part in rescuing more than 600 children in Czechoslovakia from the Nazis in the months before the outbreak of the second World War.
His was a good deed performed by stealth, and it was not generally known about for nearly 50 years until revealed on the BBC's That's Life! TV programme in 1988.
Winton was born into a wealthy Anglo-Bavarian Jewish family that had emigrated to England in the 19th century. By the time he was born, to Rudolph and Barbara Wertheim – the surname was anglicised only in 1938 – the family had converted to Christianity.
After leaving school, Winton joined a bank and then, in 1931, became a stockbroker.
In December 1938 he received a call from a friend, Martin Blake, asking him to cancel their planned skiing trip to Switzerland that Christmas and urging him to meet him in Prague instead.
Winton arrived on New Year’s Eve and was introduced by Blake to the organisers of the recently formed British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.
The city was filling up with an estimated 250,000 people, many of them Jewish, who were fleeing Germany, Austria and the German-speaking Czech region of Sudetenland, which the Nazis had annexed the previous October. Others were from political families and opponents of the Nazis. Their living conditions were pitiful and most were clamouring to get away.
Besieged
Winton became determined to at least help the children of some of the families. He started taking names, and found his room at the Europa hotel in Wenceslas Square was besieged by families, queuing all day in the freezing cold to get their names on the list. Winton and his colleagues, Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, took photographs and details of the children and began to organise their evacuation.
The first group of 20 left in January 1939, sponsored by an organisation whose intention was to convert them to Christianity. Winton, who was not religious, saw his priority as helping to get the children out rather than converting them, but he would subsequently brusquely ask rabbis who lobbied him whether they would prefer the children to be dead or alive.
Winton went back to London after three weeks with a long list of children and, after his day’s work in the City, returned home each evening to organise permits and travel warrants. It was not a straightforward matter: the British bureaucracy was complacent and slow, believing there was no urgency as war was deemed unlikely.
As the situation grew more desperate after the German occupation of all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he took to forging entry permits. That summer there were eight rail transports. A ninth Kindertransport (children's transport), which was due to leave on September 1st, 1939 with 250 more children, was cancelled by the Germans, and most of those who would have been on board were subsequently transported to concentration camps.
Nevertheless, Winton and his colleagues had saved at least 664 children: 561 of them Jewish. Among them were the future film director Karel Reisz and the Labour politician Alf Dubs, now Lord Dubs. Most of them would never see their parents and relatives again.
Nazi booty
After wartime service as an ambulance driver and in the RAF Winton worked for a time for the International Committee for Refugees, taking charge of selling Nazi booty to aid Jewish organisations.
After retirement he devoted himself to fundraising for Mencap and the Abbeyfield charity, which provides sheltered accommodation for elderly people: it was for this work that he was appointed MBE in 1983. It was not until five years later that his wife discovered a scrapbook that contained photographs of some of the children he had helped save and the family found out his story.
Winton received many awards from the Czech authorities, including the freedom of Prague and the Order of Tomas Masaryk, presented to him by Vaclav Havel. He was the subject of a Czech documentary, The Power of Good, in 2001, the year that his story, Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation – co-written by Vera Gissing, one of the children he saved – was published.
Winton insisted that it had been his colleague Trevor Chadwick, who had stayed in Prague to organise the evacuations, who had been the real hero. Nevertheless Czech president Miloš Zeman told him: “Your life is an example of humanity, selflessness, personal courage and modesty.”
Winton is survived by his children Nicholas and Barbara, and by two grandchildren.