Original subtitles

Nicky's story came out by accident after this scrapbook surfaced

after gathering dust for decades.

Once it did, though, it set about a whole chain of incredible events.

That's me before I left for England.

But until 1988, I had no idea who had rescued me

from all but certain death.

It was this old man who had saved my life

and that of hundreds of others in the Second World War.

Yet for 50 years, we knew nothing about him.

Not even that he existed.

I think there is much too much harping in the past.

Quite frankly, I can't see the point of all that.

We've never learnt anything from the past.

I think the future lies in forgetting the past,

not remembering it.

It started with Adolf Hitler instilling hatred

in Germans from childhood up for everything he considered foreign.

Most of all, for Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.

And he used the hate he had whipped up to

prepare his nation for war.

You could hear Hitler's voice raving on the radio and you could

feel the danger getting closer and closer and closer.

We were seven-year-old children in second grade.

And one day, a girl comes up to me and slaps me on the face,

left and right and left and right

and she said, "My father told me to do that," so I was stunned.

I was flabbergasted. How can she do that?

I was only about four or five years old but I hit my head

on a central heating radiator and I cut my head open

and I remember my father taking me to the doctor

and the doctor looked at it and he said,

"Erm, that does need stitching but I don't stitch Jews."

The hatred coming from Germany didn't just endanger Jews

but also the Czechs as well.

They turned out to protest Hitler's demands for a chunk of their country -

the so-called Sudeten borderlands.

The Czechs mobilised to defend themselves but they needed

help from their allies in the West.

Neither in Britain - nor for that matter in any other democracy -

was there any great will to confront Hitler and risk war.

So the British and French prime ministers went to Munich

and ended up signing a humiliating deal with Hitler.

The word Munich has ever since then stood for cowardly appeasement.

At the time, though, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

returned here to Parliament

and waved that piece of paper he brought back from Munich

and declared it to have brought "peace for our time",

a wave of relief swept through most of Europe -

but not in Czechoslovakia, of course.

We lived in Sudetenland,

this town of Pobezovice which is near to the border of Germany.

It all happened so suddenly - my mother took us four children.

We didn't manage to take anything at all.

We just ran for our lives.

This was frightening for children.

I remember standing in front of a shop window where there was

a map of Czechoslovak Republic and in a black ink was

marked in the part which was handed over to Hitler.

And there were people all around the shop making all kinds of bad remarks

and saying, "Well, you can't do that.

"We will fight and we will fight and fight."

I remember the following day, loading all our few belongings,

there weren't too much, on a horse and cart and we were out of there.

My parents, my brother and I and at the time,

I was just six years old - we had no clue what was going on.

There was a new refugee girl in our class

and I was most surprised to see that she had no shoes on her feet.

When break came, I ran across the road

and took out of my wardrobe my best shoes and brought them to her.

I told Mother what had happened - tears appeared on her face.

And she hugged me and she said,

"You did the right thing, my little girl."

The first pages of the scrapbook, and of our story, came to be

written in December 1938.

You look at the pictures, and the list of all of us and you have

to wonder - what made a 29-year-old Englishman do such a thing?

In a way, what Winton did was surprising -

the world was his oyster.

In the depth of the Great Depression,

his job as a stockbroker allowed him to enjoy the good life.

He was a champion fencer who also loved to sail, to ski and to travel.

In 1938, with Christmas approaching,

Winton had his mind set on going to Switzerland for a skiing holiday.

In other words, he wasn't exactly the kind of young man

you'd normally associate with a passion for altruism.

At least, not until that phone call that changed his life,

my life and the life of so many others.

Hello?

'The phone call was from Prague, from Martin Blake, '

a friend with whom Nicky had planned to go on that skiing trip.

Blake said he couldn't make it

because he had gone to Czechoslovakia

to help people in trouble with the Germans, so Nicky decided to forget

the ski trip and join Blake to take a look at what was going on there.

Hello.

'I went to Prague with the background knowledge' of people in England

who felt they knew much more about what Hitler was up to

than the present government.

The first thing I did then was to go around the camps where all

those people endangered by the Nazis were living.

Some Nissen huts with one little stove in the middle

and the conditions were pretty terrible.

It was very cold, snow on the ground

and a lot of the refugees were really in very bad shape.

They felt that the days were numbered before the Germans were

going to arrive in Czechoslovakia, but how could they save themselves?

What could they do? Where should they go? They were stuck.

While Winton was in Prague, he was given a map that shook him up.

He showed the map, a map of German plans

and ambitions for territorial expansion to France.

And what it showed was that the Germans had ambition to take over the whole of Europe.

Nobody had believed it.

There were many other people, refugees like us,

small children. There was a fire, smoke from cooking and heating

and I remember being given something hot cos it was cold weather then.

The respiration was not just among the poor in the camps.

In Prague and elsewhere, anxious parents,

having heard about this concerned Englishman,

headed for Winton's hotel.

Well, I didn't get much sleep when I was at the Sroubek.

I got to bed very late

and there were people knocking at my door in the morning.

I saw those people who were in difficulty, in danger.

People on Hitler's blacklist for whom there was nobody to help.

I thought, at least I ought to try and save the children.

Can you please, please take them?

Everybody in Prague said,

"Look, there is no organisation to deal with the children.

"We can't deal with them.

"Anyway, nobody will let the children in on their own

"but if you want to have a go, have a go."

And I have a motto that if something isn't blatantly impossible,

there must be a way of doing it.

So he started writing letters - here, there, everywhere -

asking for help, and he had no hesitation about going

right to the top, writing to the White House,

to President Franklin Roosevelt.

A few weeks later he got a reply, not from the White House, though,

but from much lower down on the diplomatic food chain,

from this building here in London right behind me -

the American Embassy. And the reply said,

"The United States Government is unable to permit immigration

"in excess of that provided for by existing laws."

But Winton wasn't about to let this stop him.

He and his helpers started making up the list of children

without actually knowing whether they would be able to help them.

'This is the cafe that I came down every day.'

I wasn't sitting there for more than about two minutes

before the first people came to talk to me

and find out how they could get their children to England.

And this went on the whole time I was here.

The picture must be of good quality.

As word of his campaign spread,

it drew the attention of the Germans.

They suspected that Nicky Winton's efforts were about something more

than just getting out a few children.

They decided they needed to get closer to him,

which they did, using one of the oldest tricks in the spy business -

the lure of a beautiful woman.

They met as if by chance at the Hotel Sroubek.

Nicky was enchanted, and not just by her beauty.

Her name, she said, was Kerstin

and she was the Prague representative of the Swedish Red Cross.

'I dare say she was very beautiful.'

I mean, traditional for a spy to be beautiful, isn't it?

You can't have an ugly spy. It's a contradiction in terms.

Kerstin told him she had permission to bring refugee children to Sweden.

Winton's hopes soared.

Finally, a chance perhaps to get some children out.

Friends warned him that she was a known Nazi spy.

Nicky forged ahead anyway and kept on seeing her.

And it paid off.

Kerstin got 25 children admitted to Sweden.

In fact, she flew off to Sweden with them

and disappeared from Nicky's life completely.

My parents tried every way to get us out of Czechoslovakia.

We tried to get to America. We tried to get to England.

We tried to get to Palestine.

But all the governments said, "Our borders are now closed."

My mother got up every day at four o'clock

and went to stand in the queues of different consuls,

for getting papers for Uruguay

and some other unmentionable places.

And there was no way out.

We knew that the timing was absolutely essential

to do everything now and quickly.

The number of children who were in urgent need of leaving

the country for safety was certainly over 2,000.

Winton kept on meeting with the families,

working on a list of children.

Then, suddenly, his work was threatened by a phone call from London.

The call was from his boss.

'My boss from the stock exchange'

didn't think that what I was doing in Prague was important.

He didn't think what I was doing in Prague was necessary.

He said, "Why do you want to stay in Czechoslovakia

"and help those far-off people that people don't know anything about?"

He was just a money chap on the stock exchange,

completely non-humanitarian with bags of money,

and all he thought about was money.

Winton, to the relief of his co-workers,

decided to defy his boss and stay in Prague.

Nicky Winton's efforts

came to the ears of all those who had decided

to send their children away.

My father also approached this refugee committee.

My mother took me to the Winton office on Hrubesova Ulice.

We stood in line on a winding staircase for hours

till my turn came and I was registered.

The parents exchanged their hopes and fears and we children

eyed each other for potential friends.

You had all these refugees who were fleeing from Hitler

and who were in danger of their lives

if Hitler made another move into Czechoslovakia.

This was the day the Germans occupied Prague.

There were convoys approaching.

Germans with motorcycles in front, with sidecars,

and behind them there were the big trucks - open trucks -

with soldiers seated on two rows.

The people on the street were screaming at them.

Women were crying.

Finally, a very large Mercedes drove past,

Hitler standing there with his arm raised

with three officers sitting behind.

It was so quiet, it was like you could hear a pin drop.

As soon as Hitler came in,

a Nazi officer came to our school and said,

"Who are the Jewish children?"

And another child and I put our hands up.

So he said, "You sit at the back.

"Jewish children sit at the back."

When he went out, the headmaster came in and he said,

"From now on, the back seat is the seat of honour.

"Only the best children sit there."

That was Czechoslovakia.

Winton wrote all over, looking for countries to take in his children.

Only one responded positively - his own country, Britain.

The rest of the world

closed its eyes, its ears, its hearts

and its gates.

Winton started his work in London from scratch.

There was no organisation, no existing pipeline and he was

convinced that time was running out, that war was about to come.

From this house on Hampstead Heath, Winton conducted his campaign

to get the Germans to let the children out,

the British Home Office to let them in,

to find British families to take them into their homes

and to raise the money to make it all possible.

One of the chief problems was people said that the English government

would never allow children in on their own without their parents.

I asked the Home Office and they said yes.

And they gave me certain conditions which were difficult.

I had to find a family

which would look after the child until the emergency was over.

And each child had to have a guarantor of £50.

It was a hell of a lot of money.

When I say the committee in London, it was me and a secretary,

working from home. I mean, we had no office.

We weren't an official body at all.

So all I had to do was buy some notepaper and print,

"British Committee of Refugees from Czechoslovakia Children's Section."

Then I had the police round, asking me why I had so much

correspondence with Prague.

The situation in Prague was serious.

There was active, menacing hostility from the Germans.

When Hitler came, when the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia,

I had to leave school.

We couldn't go to the movies, we wouldn't go to the opera,

to concerts - everything was forbidden.

Father was driving along Karlovo Namesti

and they saw that the Gestapo had made an action there

and they were taking people out and putting them onto a truck.

Every family was scared. Which family was not scared?

Every family was scared.

Whenever my father left for the office in the morning,

my mother was terribly upset and quite often cried

because she was so worried that he might never come home again,

being arrested by the Germans.

My father was a wanted person

and he was warned to leave.

A few days later, the Gestapo did come to look for him.

They took my mother away for questioning.

Well, I was beginning to pick up

tension and worry in the grown-ups.

My uncle and his wife committed suicide.

And then, the next day, someone came to our house

and said, "Brno is burning."

And so - I was terrified of fire.

That was the day, then, that there were three,

four synagogues burnt down to the ground.

As the despair of the parents grew, so did the pressure on Winton,

with photographs of applicants continuing to flow in.

A simple snapshot could often decide the fate of a child.

We received the pictures of the children from Prague

with details of each child.

We enlisted these pictures in the local press, the national press,

in Picture Post which was a journal which helped us enormously.

What made Winton so effective

was that in addition to his skills as a salesman,

he also had a creative spark and a willingness to experiment.

We put six or eight of these children together on one card,

merely to speed up the process

of getting the British families to choose.

If somebody said, "We'd like to take a child,"

we just said, "What sex?"

And then we said, "What age?"

We gave them pictures of half a dozen children

and then we asked them to choose a child.

Which was rather a commercial way of dealing with it

but it was quick and effective and it worked

and in most cases it went right.

But when somebody wanted to take a child,

say they were up in Newcastle from London, which is a long way away,

we got somebody in Newcastle

to vet the family to see that the family was OK.

We were sitting round a little table, you know, having supper

that Mother wasn't eating and suddenly she put...

..her knife and fork down and looked at Father and said very quietly,

"I heard today... that both Eva and Vera can go to England."

And my father looked up and there were tears in his eyes and... as he said...

"We'll have to let them go."

There was a lot of sadness in the house and also...

um... sort of...

a peculiar atmosphere.

My father looked sad, my mother, obviously, was devastated.

One day, I remember my father... called me and he said,

"You're going on a long journey.

"You're going to a country called England.

"We can't come with you."

The pressure from the parents was incredible.

We in London at that time

thought there was going to be a catastrophe at any moment,

and for us, time was absolutely essential.

We cut all kinds of corners...

..even having fake passports or travel documents made at some time

because the Home Office was a bit slow.

But it was a forgery to bamboozle the Germans, really,

not to bamboozle the British.

We didn't bring anybody in illegally,

we just speeded the process up a little.

My mother, with a friend of hers, took me to the station.

I can still see

the tension on my mother's face.

Looking anxious.

There were German soldiers with the swastika standing nearby,

lots of other parents seeing their children off.

And a clear sense of tension which even a six-year-old child felt.

My mom, she is crying so hard and... she was hysterical.

And she's asking us over and over,

"Are you sure you want to go, are you sure you want to go?"

I'm frustrated, "Why is my mother crying like that?

"I've never seen her like that."

Transport was due to leave, I'd get a message from the Germans -

"We can't let the transport go unless you give us

"so much more money."

So they were terrible.

We just had to find the money.

I mean, it was an egg you couldn't unscramble any more.

There's no way you can cancel a big operation like that.

The last thing my dad said to me was I should be his brave, cheerful little girl.

And I think I have been.

And he said, "See you soon."

My mother was beside herself. My little sister was crying.

My mother wanted to hold her.

She took my sister through the open window of the train.

We kept on telling my mother to keep her.

"Keep her, keep her," when she took her out of the window.

And she held her. I know how much she suffered, really.

I can just be sure...

It just makes me cry when I think about it.

Today you have to realise the sacrifice our parents did for us.

They didn't know where they were sending us to.

It was the courage of our parents to send their children away.

Then the next day, when we were crossing Germany,

we're passing through these railway stations

bedecked with Nazi flags, uniforms.

And there were big portraits of Hitler and the swastikas everywhere.

We arrived at the German border.

There were lots of Germans crowding around

and we wondered what was going to happen.

There was something very frightening about the way

they walked into the cabin, looked at our luggage.

There was a feeling that there was going to be trouble.

We were terrified they would do something like maybe...

arrest us. We didn't know. We had the biggest fears.

We were dumbfounded.

But finally they got off and we were delighted.

We breathed a sigh of relief.

We finally did reach the Channel coast and boarded a ship,

and the ship just seemed huge to me because the only ships I'd ever seen

before in my life were the little paddle steamers

that went up and down the Danube in Bratislava.

And, being little boys, we were fascinated by the ship

and looking around, climbing up and down gangways

and just running along all over the place.

It was fun to go on a boat. I'd never been on a big boat...

..to cross the Channel.

That night, as we crossed the English Channel,

suspended for a few hours in the calmness of the ship rocking us to sleep,

I heard voices from nearby cabins singing the Czech national anthem.

Kde domov muj? Kde domov muj?

"Where is my home? Where is my home?"

It was a question that remained unanswered for many of us for years.

The question that, for a few, remains unanswered to this day.

Liverpool Street station. This is where we arrived in London.

It's all changed, of course, except for all the noise.

What I remember most is one of those little odd facts

that stick in your mind your whole life,

and that is getting off the train, that you didn't have to climb down

to the rails as you did in Central Europe,

but the platform was even with the train door

and all you had to do was just step out.

I was very, very impressed.

'Liverpool Street station saw the arrival of another 'group of refugee children,

'another piteous cargo thrown overboard by the ruthless

'code of the modern European temper.

'A special effort is being made to help the refugees on Mother's Day.'

Then the train arrived and you had up to 200, 250 children getting out

and you had to get the right child to the right family.

And you had to treat it as a business.

When you got the right child with the right family, the family had to

sign for the child so that you had some proof of delivery.

They assembled us kids in the corner.

There were a bunch of grown-ups waiting behind the barrier,

craning their necks, waiting to pick us up.

A lady behind a wooden table called my name...

"Ben Abeles!"

A lady my mother's age came over, embraced me and kissed me.

I remember when I arrived,

having this uncomfortable string around my neck

and a big placard on my chest and I just was totally alone

with nobody around me, and I was obviously waiting

for the family who I was going to to pick me up

and I was just three years old.

There was bound to be troubles and difficulties.

Some children got left behind and the police looked after them

until we could sort things out.

It was fairly chaotic but it worked out.

There were five boys sitting on suitcases,

waiting for somebody to pick us up.

Nobody picked us up. It was late at night and, uh...

a taxi driver came over

and asked us, "Have you been here since seven o'clock in the morning?

"Are you hungry?"

And he drove us not far away from the station,

to a fish and chip shop.

Later, he took us to his own wife and small child

in a single-bedroom apartment

in which he put us up - the five of us.

English people as a people... are extremely kind

and I would say the, uh...

..the poorer they were, the kinder they were.

And we all were ushered into a big hall

and there were hundreds of the children.

And I was left sitting there...

trembling at the knees.

And suddenly the door opened and a little lady ran towards me,

laughing and smiling at the same time,

with tears streaming down her face as well and she hugged me.

Mr and Mrs Num,

the family that took us in, they were Methodists, farmers

in Redgrave in Suffolk, East Anglia.

Their cottage had a thatched roof. I'd never seen a thatched roof.

My cousin and I went around the walls, knocking -

we were afraid it may fall down!

And, for instance, the toilet was outside.

There was no electricity. And they were good to us.

They were true Christians in the real sense of the word.

And the only people who objected to what I was doing

was when one day a couple of rabbis arrived at home

and said that they understood that some of the good Jewish children

I was bringing over to this country were going to Christian homes

and that must stop.

And I said, "Well, it won't stop and if you prefer a dead Jew in Prague

"to a live one who is being brought up in a Christian home,

"that's your problem, not mine."

As the months passed, Winton knew the end was nearing and so

he kept on pressing even harder for permits for more children.

There were thousands of children on the list who wanted to get out.

We had organised eight transports from Prague.

No transport completed the operation.

It was an operation without end.

For the beginning of September, we had arranged

our biggest transport which would have comprised 250 children.

All the paperwork was done,

all the families were prepared to take the children,

all the children were waiting in the train.

Our greatest regret was that our biggest transport,

which was 250 children,

which was due to leave at the beginning of September,

was cancelled because war started.

I was in London. We watched the planes coming over, dropping bombs.

I remember the houses fell down

like cards or domino sticks.

Just collapsed.

During the Battle of Britain, bombs were raining down on us every night.

I was then an apprentice cook at the Bailey's Hotel in London

as a dishwasher and pot washer

and every night, practically, we ended up in the air raid shelter.

My mother wrote us long letters.

"My dearest children,

"I'm very happy that you're over there and don't know about evil.

"All Jews under 50 here must work in labour camps.

"We will come through it somehow and you mustn't worry about us.

"But I'm very happy that you are not here."

We learnt about the concentration camps

and the possibility that our parents might have been taken to them.

We all hoped that nothing awful happened to them,

that they were well.

The last letter from my father came in 1942.

He wrote that they had received orders to pack up,

that they were being transported somewhere else.

And in which he...

wrote to his sons...

..telling them...

not to forget the precepts they were taught at home.

And he hoped the Almighty would allow us to grow up

into just and decent men.

And that was the last thing I heard from my parents.

Nothing that happened prior to the war starting

was really of any importance any more.

What was done was done,

what couldn't be done couldn't be done, what had been done was done.

Once you can't stop a war and there is a war you, I suppose,

go to the defence of your country and I joined the RAF.

♪ There's a garden, what a garden

♪ Only happy faces bloom there

♪ And there's never any room there

♪ For a worry or a gloom there

♪ Oh, there's music and there's dancing

♪ And a lot of sweet romancing... ♪

We decided to go to town to see how everybody was celebrating and...

Trafalgar Square, I remember, in London,

where everybody went around putting up their two V for Victory.

Everybody laughed. That was so gay.

We were dancing with American soldiers.

The war was over.

But still no news of our families.

Many of us came back to Czechoslovakia to look for them.

I came to Prague, here to this building behind me,

which served as a clearing house for separated families.

Inside, wall upon wall filled with notices put up by people

looking for their missing loved ones.

Of my parents, though, not a trace.

I know they were deported to Poland

but to this day, I'm not certain how they came to die.

My first stop in Prague was the house from which my parents were deported to Terezin.

There was a minimal chance that they would have come back.

I lingered for a while, as if I were waiting for them to appear suddenly.

But in vain.

My mother and my brother,

together with about ten other children,

arrived to Auschwitz...

..and were sent to the gas chamber.

An old friend of the family who took care of the dead bodies

immediately recognised my mother.

He told her, "Take your children, go in, sit down in the corner

"and start to sing with them.

"Because if you sing and you inhale the gas, "you will die very quickly."

When my parents went to concentration camps

and when they saw other children around them, young boys and girls,

being taken to gas chambers and so forth,

they must have then...

They must have then realised what they...

..what they had done...

..when they sent the children.

My family...

my parents...

none of these people survived.

So after the war we had to continue living, to overcome the past.

We were all young, we were beginning, we had to build careers.

When you're young you take everything in life,

including survival, for granted.

As I grew older, though, I began to wonder more and more how it was

that when so many died, our parents, friends,

families and millions of others,

how it came to be that we fortunate few

on those trains from Prague were spared.

That is, until 50 years later when this scrapbook surfaced.

The scrapbook and its story gathered dust for decades

in the Wintons' attic,

until one day Nicky's wife, Grete, found it, opened it,

became fascinated, and yet was puzzled.

And so 50 years after it happened,

Nicky Winton finally told his wife what he had for so long kept secret.

And his wife went to London and she tried to

give this story to several people

but nobody was interested

until she came to me. I was given the scrapbook and this list of names

and I thought it was very moving

because they were ordinary names

of people and Czech children.

For instance, Berman, Thomas,

Bekefi, Jiri,

Benedict, Ruth.

And we wrote to every one of them

and from these... over 600 names, we got 250 answers.

And most of the children were delighted.

They did not know who had saved them

and they did not know their own story.

It caught the eye of Esther Rantzen, who was working for the BBC.

So we did some research

and we managed to track down some of those children,

now adults, living in England.

We were absolutely thrilled.

This lady said to me, "What's your name?"

So I said, "Pinkasovic."

When I saw my name and my brother's name printed in this...

The biggest shock of my life.

I couldn't speak, I couldn't breathe.

I had goose bumps all over my arms.

All these years, 50 years.

Nobody knew who masterminded our rescue and then out of the blue,

I was asked to take part in a television show - That's Life! -

where, to my joy and...

..oh, such fulfilment,

I came face-to-face

with the man who saved my life.

They got me there, in a way, under false pretences.

I was sat in a seat which was focused on the camera and...

..I became part of this programme.

I didn't know I was going to meet for the first time

the children that I'd brought over so many years before.

..managed to save 664 children.

This is his scrapbook. There are all kinds of fascinating pictures in it.

Perhaps you can see - this is a picture of Nicholas Winton himself

with one of the children he rescued.

If you look at the very back of this scrapbook...

Fascinating things in it, all the letters...

But back here is the list of all the children.

This is Vera Diamant, now Vera Gissing.

We did find her name on his list.

Vera Gissing is with us here tonight. Hello, Vera.

And I should tell you that you are actually

sitting next to Nicholas Winton.

Hello.

Thank you.

I wore this around my neck

and this is the actual pass that we were given to come to England.

And I'm another of the children that you saved.

Can I ask, is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life

to Nicholas Winton? If so, could you stand up, please?

The handkerchief I'm holding goes back to 1939.

My mother saw me off on the Kindertransport from Prague

and she took a handkerchief out of her bag,

in order to wipe my tears at our goodbyes.

I knew I would never see my parents again

and I've kept this handkerchief, newly laundered, ever since.

I'm glad that I've shared my stories

for the sake of being recorded for posterity.

Sadly, I don't think the world has learnt lessons from the past.

Everybody has to learn to live with everybody else,

regardless of creed or religion.

I never thought what I did 70 years was going to have such a big impact

as apparently it has.

And if it has now got a story

which helps people to live for the future,

well, that will be an added bonus.