Original subtitles

There are some stories which we are not only an audience to,

but may become their participants.

Until 1988 it was all a mystery.

This old man saved my life

and that of hundreds of others in the 2nd world war.

Yet for 50 years after our escape from all but a certain death,

we knew nothing about him.

Not even that he existed.

Now he is celebrated as a hero.

He insists that what he did was nothing to make a fuss about.

His story came to fascinate people the world over, especially children.

They wanted to know more, much more. And they had questions.

Why did he do it?

How did he manage to succeed in what seemed like mission impossible?

So along with others I set out to discover

and tell the story in a film.

Given that I owe my life to him I couldn't have done no less.

NICKY'S FAMILY

Nicky's story came out by accident

after this scrapbook surfaced after gathering dust decades.

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

Oh, hey guys, that's me.

-Really? -Before I left for England.

The scrapbook is filled with photographs of children

caught up in a lottery of life and death, some of their drawings,

urgent telegrams and pleading letters from their desperate parents -

messages from a long ago past

that brought on a rush of childhood memories.

Memories of the 1930's,

of the pleasures of childhood in Czechoslovakia -

the country we all came from.

As I remember life in my own hometown of Bratislava,

the capital of Slovakia,

it was a pleasant, tolerant, multicultural and multilingual place.

I learned to greet my mother's women friends

with the then standard politeness of: "I kiss your hand."

It was, and I remember it still: "Ruku bozkavam" in Slovak,

"Ruku libam" in Czech, "Ich kuess die Hand" in German

and "Kese czokolom" in Hungarian.

What I remember most vividly, though, are the small things

like going to a caf� with my father.

And he used to play chess and we used to get hot chocolate

with lots of whipped cream on top of it.

From my childhood as a family, we were very patriotic.

My father encouraged us to go to all the Czech wonderful manifestations

that took part because Czechoslovakia was for the first time

a country of its own and we all believed in its great future.

and enjoyed many good things.

My brother was marvelous.

He invented all kinds of wonderful games for us to do,

which were usually a bit risky and a bit naughty.

And I would have done anything with him at all.

We lived in a small village in the foothills of Tatra mountains.

And we had a very happy childhood.

We spent a lot of time in the woods,

picking strawberries and mushrooms and wild flowers.

And we had animals.

I had a chicken, and we had one cow, and we planted vegetables.

And my mother taught us all the Slovak songs

and we sang together a great deal.

We used to go every Sunday to Karlovy Vary along the promenade.

My father was an amateur dancer and won many prizes

and it was a well-known family outing.

We had a good life till the Nazis took over in 1938.

Before Nazism was born and grew and strength in Central Europe.

It started with Germany's Nazi dictator, Adolph 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.

You could see the Hitlerjugend - Hitler youth,

marching through our streets

and you could feel the danger getting closer and closer and closer.

We were 7-year-old children in 2nd grade (in German school)

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

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 4 or 5 years old (living in Sudetenland),

but I hit my head on the 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:

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 mobilized 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

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, in the town of Pohberovice,

which is near to the border of Germany.

It all happened so suddenly.

My mother took us 4 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 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:

Well, you can't do that, we will fight, we will fight, we will 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 that time I was just 6 years old.

We had no clue what was going on.

There was a new refugee 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 stock broker allowed him to enjoy the good life.

He was a champion fencer 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.

He wasn't exactly the kind of young man

you would normally associate with a passion for altruism.

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

my life and the lives of so many others.

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.

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 the people endangered by the Nazis

were living in misenhuts with one little stove in the middle.

And the conditions were pretty terrible.

It was very cold, snow on the ground;

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

They felt that their 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 friends.

It says: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.

One people, one empire, one Fuhrer. Gross Deutschland.

And what it showed was

that the Germans had an 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 because it was cold weather then.

The desperation 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. 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 black list for whom there was nobody to help.

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

Everybody in Prague said:

There is no organization 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 and there, 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,

from much lower down on the diplomatic foot chain.

From this building here in London

which at the time housed 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 caf� that I came down every day.

I wasn't sitting there for more than 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.

As word of his campaign spread, it drew the attention of the Germans.

They suspected that Winton's efforts

were about something more than just getting out a few children.

When their distant observations produced nothing,

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 do say she was very beautiful.

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

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

She told him she had the permission to bring the 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, to Palestine.

But all the governments said: Our borders are now closed.

My mother got up every day at 4 o'clock

and went to stand in queues of different consulates -

for getting papers to 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 two thousand.

Nicky kept of 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 it was necessary.

He said: Why do you want to stay in Czechoslovakia

and help those far-off people the 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

that 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.

People on the streets were screaming at them, women were crying.

Finally, a very large Mercedes drove past with Hitler standing there,

with his arm raised, with three officers sitting behind.

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

It was a very disturbing feeling to me, I was 10 years old.

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 my hand up.

So he said: You will 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 honor.

Only the best children sit there.

That was Czechoslovakia.

Winton wrote all over, looking for countries to take in these 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 organization, no existing pipeline

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

From this house on London's 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 that 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.

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

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 to buy some notepaper

and print British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.

And at a very special meeting I had with myself

I them appointed myself Honorary Secretary.

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 and Germans occupied Czechoslovakia

I had to leave school.

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

or to concert, everything was forbidden.

Father was driving along the Karlovo namesti,

saw that the Gestapo made an action there -

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

Every family was scared. Which family wasn't 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.

One day, some German officers came to this Jewish town hall

and demanded from my father

a list of names and addresses of the Jews in Prague.

And he told them that he didn't have anything like that.

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 grownups.

My uncle and his wife committed suicide.

And then, the next day,

someone came to our house and said Brno was burning.

I was terrified of fire.

That was the day then

that there were 3, 4 synagogues burned 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 the addition of his skills as a salesman,

he also had a creative spark and willingness to experiment.

We put 6 or 8 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.

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 see that the family was ok.

Then we got to send them photos of a number of children.

My father came home with his eyes shining,

grinning from ear to ear and said:

We think we may be able to save a child.

And my mother said: That's all very well with your head in the clouds,

always saving the world, but how can we afford it,

an extra child coming into our home?

And my father said: There's a child in need,

we will work out "Can we afford it?" later.

And he got from Nicholas Winton two photographs

and put them in front of me and said:

Now, these are little girls now you must choose.

This isn't just a game anymore, you have to be serious.

So I chose Vera Diamantova.

How did you feel when you were told or asked

that you were going to go to England?

We were sitting down around a table having supper.

But 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 her eyes as he said:

We have to let them go.

There was a lot of sadness in the house

and also a sort of 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

that 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 faked passports or travel documents

made at some time because the Home Office was a bit slow.

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.

Two days before I left with the Kindertransport,

my parents took me to some resort near Prague

where there was a lake where they wanted to be alone with me.

I saw a very pretty young girl there

and I offered to teach her how to row

and I got completely lost in this activity.

Finally when I came back my mother looked at me with great relief

and reproach and said:

Is that what you do to your parents one day before you are leaving?

And I felt very guilty about it.

I have a dress that my mother made for me.

She made everything herself.

She sowed for us to have clothes not only for the age

that we were at the time, but for...

she didn't know how long it would last, how long we would be away,

so she sowed for a year ahead or so.

Then the day came when we had to leave.

We went to the train. Everybody was there already -

my grandparents and all our friends and all our neighbors.

And they came to say good-bye.

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

And I can still see the tension on my mother's face, looking anxious.

There were German soldiers standing nearby,

lots of other parents seeing their children off

and a clear sense of tension, which even a 6-year-old child felt.

My mom, she's 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 am frustrated - why is my mother crying like that?

The 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. You just had to find the money.

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

Was it easy for you to leave and to go to England?

I have to say, it was because I was looking forward to it.

Here I was a kid from Central Europe and I was going to England.

So then 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 off the train.

We kept on telling my mother to keep her

when she took her out of the window and she held her...

I know how much she suffered, really. I can just visualize it.

It just makes me cry when I think about it.

And if she hadn't put her back on she wouldn't have survived.

Decades later, I would catch myself looking at my own children,

trying to recapture a fraction of the dread those

and my parents must have felt.

Today you have to realize 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.

We all had one little suitcase and a little blanket

and we sat on these benches here in a carriage like this

and there were a lot of children... a lot of crying...

everybody was crying.

It was a long journey and so I climbed up on the shelf like this

and I could stretch my legs and it felt good, I was happy.

70 years after we left for Britain, many of us found themselves

making the journey all over again on a special train.

It was a time to remember and reminisce.

They put me in charge of you.

And I put you on my lap and we started playing Hop, hop, rider.

-You still remember that? -I remember.

Hop, hop, rider If he falls he will be crying.

If he falls into the ditch, He will be eaten by the ravens.

If he falls into the mud, The rider falls with a splash!

Then the next day when we were crossing Germany,

we were passing through these railway stations

bedecked with Nazi flags, uniforms.

Then there were big portraits of Hitler and 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 that they would do something like maybe arrest us.

We didn't know. I mean we had the biggest fears.

We were dumbfounded.

But finally they got off and we were delighted

and we breathed the sigh of relief.

We finally arrived to Holland.

Through the entire train there was an atmosphere of relief.

It was like coming out of a tunnel.

It was very strikingly different.

As if the sun started shining.

We came to the windows and we started shouting:

Hitler, Goehring, Goebbles "do prdele!"

"Do prdele" means into the ass. And we were very happy about this.

I remember very well that the first stop in Holland

was at a railway station where there were a group of ladies.

Some ladies dressed in Dutch national costumes entered and they smiled.

Although we couldn't understand a word they said,

they didn't have to talk.

It was clear that we were going to get something good to eat.

They gave us cocoa, the famous Dutch droste cocoa, which was delicious.

We received white bread.

We had never eaten this kind of bread and I felt that either it was wet,

or somebody wetted it, made in cold...

It seemed kind of odd to me, kind of pap that I didn't like.

-The bread? -It is very difficult to describe.

It's indescribable!

We finally did reach the channel coast and boarded a ship.

The ship just seemed huge to me because the only ships

I've ever seen before were paddle steamers.

And being little boys we were fascinated by the ship

and looking around, climbing up and down the gangways.

It was fun to go on a boat.

I've never been on a big boat to cross the channel.

That night, as we crossed the English Channel

suspended in the calmness of the ship,

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

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,

but the platform was even with the train door.

I was very, very impressed.

Liverpool Street Station saw the arrival of another group of refugees,

cargo thrown overboard by the ruthless call

of the modern European temper.

A special effort is being made to help the refugees.

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 to the right family,

the family had to sign for the child, so you had some proof of delivery.

They assembled us kids in the corner,

there were bunch of grown ups 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 was just totally alone,

with nobody around me.

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

And I was just 3 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 5 boys sitting on suitcases,

waiting for somebody to pick us up.

Nobody picked us up.

It was late at night and a taxi driver came over and asked us:

You've been here since 7 o'clock in the morning, are you hungry?

And he drove us not far away from the station, to a fish-and-chips shop.

I remember him showing us

putting salt and vinegar for the first time onto the fish.

I know to this day that the fish and chips was very good.

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 poorer they were, the kinder they were.

And we all were ushered into a big hall

and there were hundreds of the children.

I had no idea where I was going and child after child,

hundreds of these children, one after another went,

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

and she hugged me and she spoke words I didn't understand then

and they were: You shall be loved.

And that's the most important words any child can hear.

Mr. and Mrs. Num, the family that took us in, were Methodists,

farmers in Redgrave in Suffolk, East Anglia.

Their cottage had a thatched roof.

I have never seen a thatched roof.

My cousin and I were going around the walls knocking -

we were afraid it may fall down.

And 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 an alive one who is being brought up in a Christian home,

I said that is your problem, not mine.

My guardian came from a distinguished Scottish family.

She had an enormous influence on my life,

she provided me with an ethical yardstick.

The lessons from her life were the extraordinary unselfishness.

Marnie gave me this wonderful dog, a great dane, and I was very small,

I could ride on his back, on the dog's back.

-We used to play mothers and fathers. You remember? -Yes.

We just played happily together.

We did. And then we played cowboys and Indians.

My first day in London, Audrey, my guarantor's daughter,

took me to Harrods here.

There were so many new sights for me. We had a great time.

I decided I was going to marry Audrey, even though she had pimples.

But I wanted to live in that rich house of theirs.

Once the children had arrived and were with their new families,

I had no contact with them anymore.

I knew that they were being well looked after

and some went to the Czech school in Wales.

We had many pillow fights in school.

And many times these pillows burst and the feathers blew out

and we had to clean it up.

I liked it there.

It was a good atmosphere with boys and girls together.

Let's face it: I couldn't run down those stairs like that any longer,

but I do remember those days as though they were yesterday.

Despite the separation from our families,

despite the fact that we missed them so much,

those were some of the happiest times in my life

and in that of many of my schoolmates.

We also did things in the community.

We went to old-age home and spent time with the people there.

We learned that you are not the center of the universe,

that there are other people out there who had problems and needs

and maybe you can do something about it.

So it was fun, it was great fun.

Also, we acquired an education.

We were all crazy about the boys. All of us girls, you know.

We tried to attract their attention in every way it was possible

and when I look back at it, we were absolutely nuts.

I was inexperienced with girls and I asked my brother

how to arrange girls when I finally took them out.

His advice was I should take them to the cinema

and when the lights went down,

to put my arm around her and everything else would follow.

But...

So I'm afraid his advice was good in theory,

but not very good in practice.

Month of August, which is normally a happy month of holidays,

has been passed in Europe in the shadow of war.

Hitler demanded Danzig and the Polish corridor.

I've got a letter here, which my father wrote to the foster parents.

You will, I suppose, feel how it aches us

to be separated from our own child.

Here the possibility to care for her suitable future

is smaller with every day.

As the moths passed, Winton knew the end was near,

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

I mean there were thousands of children on the list

who wanted to get out.

We had organized 8 transports from Prague.

No transport completed the operation.

I mean it was an operation without end.

For the beginning of September,

we had arranged our biggest transport,

which could have comprised 250 children.

All the paperwork was done,

all the families were prepared,

all the children were waiting in the train...

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost.

We shall never surrender.

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.

I was afraid to go out on the street afterwards.

It was a terrifying experience.

And our neighbors got a direct hit on their shelter in their garden

and all of them were killed.

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

I was then in an apprentice cook at the Bailys hotel in London

as a dishwasher and a pot washer and every night, practically,

we ended up in the air raid shelter.

I was sitting next to a maid and when a bomb was falling,

she clutched my knee.

And I asked her whether we could share a blanket and she agreed.

And then I put my hand on her knee and she didn't object.

And my hand started roaming and she didn't object, either.

So I really looking forward to these air raids.

But then there was a lull in the air raids and I missed her so much.

My mother was absolutely heartbroken and she wrote us long letters.

My dearest children, I am very happy that you are over there

and don't know about evil.

All Jews under 50 here must work in labor camps.

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

But I am very happy that you are not here.

If you were, I would have many more worries.

We learned 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 would be transported somewhere else.

And in which he wrote 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 last thing I heard from my parents.

Our greatest regret was that our biggest transport,

which was 250 children,

which was due to leave at the beginning of September,

was canceled because war started.

And almost none of those children survived.

Nothing that happened prior to the war starting

was really of any importance anymore.

What was done was done,

what couldn't be done couldn't be done.

Once you can't stop a war and there is a war

you go to the defense of your country.

And I joined the RAF.

I joined the royal air force, our Czech squadron number 31 1

and our job was to look for enemy shipping.

I volunteered for the Czech RAF

and I was able to help to hunt German submarines.

I wanted to help to liberate my country.

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

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.

We returned to Prague with the whole squadron,

all of us really happy to be home,

there was a huge parade in Prague, in which I took part as well.

All the girls were dressed in national dress

and all of us enjoyed it.

The war was over.

But still no news of our families.

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

which served as a clearinghouse 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 am 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 10 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 recognized my mother.

He told her: Please, take your children 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 that they must have then...

they must have then realized what they had done...

when they sent their 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.

We spread all over the world, some of us in Canada, in the States,

in Israel, in Australia, in Britain.

Wherever we ended up, the most important thing for us

was to start a new life with new families.

50 YEARS LATER

I hadn't got a clue where all these 700 children were.

I wasn't in touch with any of them.

For me it was an episode

and it was something that happens.

So many to me more important things, happened in the meantime.

He is very keen on his gardening

and he spends a lot of time in the garden.

But he is a very domesticated husband,

he does a lot of helping out in the house.

I get annoyed because he is very untidy.

I am not all that tidy, but he is really very untidy.

I'm fairly happy with Greta. With what we do together.

-Fairly! I like that! -Very happy. Very happy.

Any good marriage is a marriage of compromise.

The only thing was, Greta compromised more than I did.

She was quite a very special person.

If you're in love with somebody, everybody says when that person dies:

After time things will get better.

It's not true. It gets worse.

Instead of living you just exist.

And I spend my time with carpentry,

mending the bicycle, photography.

I listen to music and I do my embroidery, I do a bit of gardening.

My father has been involved in helping charities all his life.

A lot of his work has been with a charity helping old people.

I'm just building a home for Alzheimers.

It costs 4 million pounds.

He still acts as if he's half his age.

He's still very active and still likes making mischief.

His current plan is to try to be arrested

to show what a silly law we have to do with helping old people.

Well, I drive and I like driving quickly.

You got a speeding ticket last month. What were you doing?

I got a speeding ticket in a one-way road

where there was no other car

and I was doing 50 miles an hour in a 40 miles area.

And the police said: Have you got any excuse, why you were for doing it?

And I said that I had to go to the lavatory.

Being so active must be a recipe for longevity -

just to keep going and not stop.

Nicky, last words before you go?

My words are that I hope I will come back.

One thing I've learned from grandpa is

that you should always try to help people.

I don't mind if you tell the truth.

Of course I love my grandpa. With all heart. Everything.

When you're young you take everything in life,

including survival, for granted.

As I grew older 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,

the fortunate few on those trains, were spared.

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

Then we knew.

The scrapbook and its story gathered dust for decades

in the Winton's attic until one day, Nicky's wife Greta found it,

opened it, became fascinated, and yet was puzzled.

And so 50 years after it happened,

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

I suppose there's number of things,

which husbands don't tell their wives.

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 there 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 didn't know who saved them and didn't know their own story.

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

So we did some search and we managed to track down some of those children,

now adult, 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 fulfillment I came to face,

face to face, with the man who saved my life.

They got me there in a way under false pretenses.

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

I became part of this program.

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

the children that I brought over so many years before.

...who managed to save 664 children. This is his scrapbook.

There are all sorts 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 the scrapbook...

fascinating things in it, 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.

Thank you.

I wore this around my neck

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

And I am another of the children that you saved.

Can I ask, is there anyone in our audience tonight

who owes their lives to Nicholas Winton?

If so, could you stand up, please?

We are part of his family.

He has now accepted us as a sort of the honorary father

and he is accepting our children as the honorary grandfather,

hes the head, I think, of the biggest family in the world.

70 YEARS LATER

When our memorial train from Prague arrived in London,

the man who had waited for us at the station in 1939

was waiting for us once again.

This time, though, at age 100, we knew who he was.

It was a wonderful thing that Nicky Winton did

and without him nobody in this room would be sitting here.

I wouldn't be here, dad wouldn't be here.

So it's quite a wonderful thing that he did.

A lot of us have a feeling

that we have to somehow repay Winton for all what he did.

We do it by doing work, which is useful and good

and help other people.

For the last 12 years I work as a volunteer

at the Schneider's children's hospital and I enjoy it.

I did some work in research on ballistic missiles,

but after that I changed my career completely.

We built this church first

and then a home for adults with severe mental handicap.

I've always felt that I owe something to Nicky Winton,

to my parents who were so courageous and sent me off.

And so I always felt I need to help people

and I've done that in a soup kitchen

and throughout my life I've always tried to be very helpful.

I spent most of my professional career working on semiconductors.

We invented the thermoelectric power generator,

which provides electric power to the spacecraft Voyager I and II

on the way to Jupiter, Saturn and the outer planets.

Nicky's deed is like a small stone thrown into a small lake.

And the ripples and the waves from that stone

are getting wider and wider and wider.

And the wider it gets, the more good is being done in the world.

Nicholas Winton saved grandma and he didn't have to

and that made me want to help people, too.

And I heard about people who had cancer and lost all their hair.

And I cut 10 inches off my hair

and they made it into a wig for one kid who had cancer.

And I feel very good about doing.

This summer, I helped organize a peace camp for girls.

There were 7 Jews and 7 Arabs.

We realized that we're the same

and that we are living in the same place and we need to find a peace.

Right now I have 7 new Palestinian friends, which I very much like.

Any young people from different countries

were eager to show Winton what good they themselves were doing.

They started filming their activities,

interviewing various personalities,

all for a special program which they will present in Prague.

In Australia, we shipped our clothes to people in Ecuador

and it was nice getting letters back from them as they were writing

and expressing how appreciative they were to us

that their lives have changed.

Winton is showing that with perseverance and determination

you can achieve anything.

In Cambodia when we arrived we have seen children dying on the street.

Then there was no organization helping HIV positive children.

And we have decided that we have to help these children.

The problem was that everybody was against this idea,

saying that what two Slovak people can do in faraway Cambodia.

But we have decided not to give up.

I remember Nicholas Winton said

everything is possible if it's fundamentally reasonable.

All stories that help children grow in a world,

in which humanity is being celebrated and inhumanity denounced -

these stories are important.

Everybody can help.

Children can send their letters to the kids

to show them that there is somebody faraway thinking about them.

It's a big help.

We have saved and treated over 5 000 children,

but still we have a lot of work to do.

A lot of children are still waiting for us.

We need special effort to bring up

our basic nature of human beings - compassion.

Here is example of Nicholas Winton -

we should learn from his motivation and from his courage, from his act.

We must carry his spirit generation to generation.

Then humanity's future will be brighter.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sir Nicholas Winton!

We've been so much impressed with Nicholas Winton

that we started our project, Suitcases for Cambodia.

Suitcase is our symbol of help for children.

I think that every single person on the Earth needs to know

that they are special, that they're loved.

Nicholas Winton has influenced so many people all over the world

to help someone who is very ill or in danger.

If you have ever helped someone in need show it now.

You don't have to be a politician or a millionaire to make a difference.

All you have to have is some ambition and courage.

Hello, Cambodia!

NICKY'S FAMILY

I never thought what I did 70 years ago

was going to have such a big impact as apparently it has.

And if it is now got a story,

which helps people to live for the future,

well, that will be an added bonus.

Everything is possible if it's fundamentally reasonable.

Nicholas Winton

There are some stories which we are not only an audience to,

but may become their participants.