In 1938, Nicholas Winton helped arrange train transport, foster homes, and sometimes even forged visa documents for hundreds of Czech children so they’d be safe from the Holocaust.
Nicholas Winton
Yad Vashem Photo Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Nicholas Winton holds a rescued boy being taken from Prague to London in early 1938.

It was the spring of 1954 and Nicholas Winton was in the middle of an ultimately fruitless campaign for a seat on the borough council of Maidenhead, England, a small city west of London. His campaign leaflet included basic voting information, a photo of himself, a three-paragraph appeal to voters, and, at the bottom, a section labeled “Personal Details.”

Buried in the middle of that section — after mentions of Winton’s achievements in local politics and business, and before mentions of his fencing and air force service — was the following line: “After Munich evacuated 600 refugee children from Czechoslovakia.”

The Maidenhead voters, along with virtually anyone beyond Maidenhead’s borders, may have given this line little notice. Yet those eight words contain an incredible story of courage and selflessness.

This is the inspiring true story of Nicholas Winton’s astonishing heroics during one of modern history’s darkest moments.

Nicholas Winton, “The British Schindler”
Between December 1938 and September 1939, with World War II looming, Nicholas Winton and his associates managed to save the lives of at least 669 children from the Nazis in Czechoslovakia.

Nicholas Winton Memorial
Wikimedia Commons
A memorial to Nicholas Winton at the Prague main railway station, the stage for his heroics during the Holocaust.

But you’d never quite glean that from the event’s oblique mention in Winton’s campaign leaflet 15 years later. Likewise, it would be a further 34 years ago the international media spotlight would find Winton and bring him tributes, statues, and nicknames like “the British Schindler” — all of which Winton himself ultimately shied away from.

It’s a stance befitting a man who believed, as he told The Guardian in 2014, that in the adage, “Some people are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” he fell in the final category.

The event that spurred Nicholas Winton’s rescue makes mission it easier to see why he placed himself in that category. Indeed, the story of his rescue mission began with a single phone call and a ski trip that never happened.