The Ones Who Stood Up

It was just before Christmas 1938, in London.

Nicholas Winton was 29. He worked at the Stock Exchange. He was supposed to go skiing in Switzerland with a friend, Martin Blake.

But Martin Blake phoned to cancel. He was in Prague. He told him to come and see what he was doing there.

Nicholas Winton went.

In Prague, he visited camps full of refugees from the Sudetenland. What he saw there made him want to help.

He started with the children.

In his hotel room on Wenceslas Square, parents queued all day, in the cold, to register theirs.

Back in London, he worked at the Stock Exchange by day. In the evenings, he looked for foster families. Each child also needed a guarantee of 50 pounds. All through the summer of 1939, he placed photos of the children in a magazine, Picture Post, to find them homes. His mother, Barbara, helped him in the office.

The first transport left Prague on March 14, 1939, the day before the Germans took over the whole country. Others followed, all summer long.

In all, 669 children reached Britain.

The largest transport, 250 children, was due to leave on September 1, 1939. That day, the Germans cancelled it. Nicholas Winton believed that none of them was ever heard of again.

Then life went on. And for almost fifty years, hardly anyone knew what he had done.

In 1988, his wife, Grete, found an old scrapbook from 1939 in their attic. Inside: the lists, the children's photos, the names of the foster families.

The story reached a BBC programme, That's Life!.

Nicholas Winton was invited to sit in the front row of the audience. He did not know who was sitting around him. They were children he had saved, now grown up.

In a later programme, the presenter, Esther Rantzen, asked whether anyone in the audience owed their life to him. And, if so, to stand up.

All around him, more than two dozen people rose and applauded.

Then she asked who was the child or grandchild of one of those children.

And the rest of the audience stood.

He did not want a fuss made. He said it simply:

This man saved no one alone. There were colleagues in Prague, like Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner, parents who let their children go, families who opened their doors, a mother in the office. Ubuntu says it in its own way: a life is always saved by many hands.

Nicholas Winton died on July 1, 2015, at 106.

On one of his gold rings were engraved words taken from the Talmud: save one life, save the world.

One evening in 1988, that world had stood up, all around him.