In December 1938, 29-year-old Nicholas Winton cancelled a skiing holiday in Switzerland and went to Prague instead, at the request of a friend who was doing refugee work. What he found was thousands of Jewish families desperate to get their children out before the Nazi occupation.

Operating from a hotel room at the Hotel Europa in Wenceslas Square, Winton set up a one-man rescue operation. He created lists of children, photographed them, found foster families in Britain, raised money for travel costs, and — crucially — obtained the necessary entry permits from the British Home Office, sometimes by forging them when bureaucracy moved too slowly.

The Trains

Between March and August 1939, Winton organized eight trains carrying children from Prague to London. The children — most between the ages of 2 and 17 — traveled across Germany by train, then by ferry to England, where foster families met them at Liverpool Street Station.

The ninth train, carrying 250 children, was scheduled to depart on September 1, 1939 — the day Germany invaded Poland. It never left. All 250 children are believed to have perished in the Holocaust.

Fifty Years of Silence

After the war, Winton never told anyone what he had done. He went back to his work as a stockbroker. His wife, Grete, found a scrapbook in the attic in 1988 containing the lists of children, their photographs, and the correspondence with foster families. She gave it to a Holocaust researcher.

In 1988, Winton was invited to appear on the BBC program "That's Life!" The host, Esther Rantzen, asked if anyone in the audience owed their life to Nicholas Winton. The entire row of people sitting next to him stood up. They were his children — now adults in their 50s and 60s. Winton wept.

The video of that moment remains one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of television ever broadcast. Winton was knighted in 2003. He died in 2015 at the age of 106. It is estimated that there are now over 6,000 descendants of the children he saved.