A children What they have achieved Nazi camps They were quickly separated from their families, marked and redirected to crowded barracks, where cold, malnutrition and illness reduced the probability of survival to minimal extremes.
Which were considered suitable for work Continuous operationwithout any rest or medical care, while small ones, not having direct work, were Eliminated in the first days after entryField
As the war develops, treatment has become even more cruel, with medical experiments, forced translations and systematic executions. In this gloomy context, The possibilities of saving minors were reduced to extraordinary gestures This avoided the logic of the Nazi system, similar to the one that launched Nicholas Winton In Prague in 1939.
Change on vacation led him to the drama of hundreds of families
The trip that should take him to skiing on the Alps is ultimately distracted by a call from his friend Martin BlakeThis field of plans forced him to land in Czechoslovakia and face a situation that he did not expect. Hundreds of families, mostly Jews, were looking for some way to protect their children from the promotion of the NazisThe field in this environment Nicholas Winton improvised the network that I will finishSalvation of life more than 600 minorsField
His operating center was Small hotel room in PragueWhere he began to collect requests for the help of parents, who, knowing about the danger, were ready to separate from their children in order to avoid the deadly destination. Winton took note of each case organized lists, He contacted host families in the UK and controlled visas in ContrelojThe British Wednesday field Keeper He notes that the screw himself explained that he felt forced to intervene, because “no one did it.”
He The first train left the main station Prague March 14, 1939. He traveled with twenty children who crossed Germany, entered the Netherlands and went to England. After this first expedition, seven more followed. According to BBC, Ruth HalovOne of the girls who was part of this plan explained that “there was a steam locomotive, and the old wagons were made with wooden boards.”
Each child needed a tutor, communication and a family who wanted to place it
Logistics was complex and dangerous. Every minor I needed a finished guardian in the United Kingdom, the family that greeted it, and 50 -footing bondWhich then amounted to several months of salary. Winton personally took care of finding this support by advertising in the British press and personal contacts. His efforts prevented Hundreds of minors were sent to the destruction fieldsField
One of the most difficult stories proposed this in a few years Thomas BermannSaved by the screw, in the act held in London. Newspaper Time He gathered that Bermann said that his parents told him that he was going on vacation with Uncle Hans Popper to Folkstone. ” They did not say goodbye to tears, they tried to protect him from fear. He never saw his father again.
Winton returned to England until the summer, but left employees such as Prague Trevor Chadwick And Dorin WarrinerWhich continued to coordinate walks to the last train. The ninth was appointed on September 1, but on the same day Germany invaded Poland. Convoy with 250 children, ready to leave, never leftThe field “If the train had left a day earlier, it would have happened,” Pienton himself explained in an interview with published Keeper In 2015.
For half a century, he was silent about the operation that led
Despite the fact that he had achieved, Windon did not talk about the subject for decades. In 1988, his wife found Notebook with photos and names of saved childrenHe taught the historian Elizabeth Maxwellwhich led to its appearance in the BBC program This is lifeThe field there he met the faces that he helped to save. His reaction was recorded on the video.
Over the years, he received awards from several institutions, including British EmpireField in an interview with 2014, also assembled KeeperHe explained that He was not considered the main character of an extraordinary feat: “It has become something important, but it does not look like it when I did it.”
Nicholas Winton died in 106 years in 2015, on the same day as the anniversary of the largest transport that he organized. His heritage, despite the fact that it remained in the shade for half a century, was reflected in hundreds of lives that could continue.
