| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
'British Schindler' knighted
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Britain's Queen Elizabeth paid homage on Tuesday to Nicholas Winton, a former stockbroker who saved the lives of 669 young Jews by helping them flee Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Nazi invasion in 1939. The queen knighted Sir Nicholas at Buckingham Palace. Asked by reporters after the ceremony what she had said to him, the 93-year-old Sir Nicholas replied: "She said, 'It's wonderful that you were able to save so many children."' Winton, widely known as "the British Schindler," in reference to Oskar Schindler who saved over 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust, saw the plight of Jewish families in Czechoslovakia while visiting a friend in Prague over Christmas 1938. He noted several organisations were working to evacuate adults on Hitler's hit-list -- Jews, intellectuals and Communists -- but none was helping the children, so he went to work, asking countries beyond German influence to take them in. Only Sweden and Britain agreed to help. The British Home Office grudgingly agreed to accept children under 17, if he could find families to take them in. Winton appointed himself Honorary Consul of the British Refugee Committee, Children's Section, and soon many terrified Czech parents began flocking to his "office," a corner table of his hotel cafe. In three weeks, he returned to Britain with the names and photographs of thousands of children and started finding families for them. Throughout 1939 he worked frantically, and even forged British documents to fool the Nazi authorities into letting the children go, because the Home Office was so slow. Eight trains of children left Czechoslovakia between May and August of 1939. A ninth, with 250 children, was set to leave Prague on September 3, the day Britain declared war on Germany.
It was not allowed to leave. The children went back home with their parents and all later died in the camps. Winton has said the memory of these, and the thousands more children on his list that he could not save, still angers him. Winton served during World War II and later worked for the U.N. Refugee Fund and World Bank. His story only came to light when his wife found a dusty scrapbook with a list of Czech children's names, photographs, and desperate letters from parents, in their attic in 1988. Since then, Winton has been reunited with hundreds of the children he helped to save more than half a century ago. Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
