The story of the 669 children, almost all of them Czechoslovakian Jews, brought safely to Great Britain in 1939, thanks to the heroism of nicholas winton, the English citizen who is now 101 years old
Last January in Prague, we took part at the “Nickyho rodina” (Nicky’s family) world premiere, a documentary film with a short acted part, which tells the story of 660 children, almost all of them Czechoslovakian Jews, who had been rescued and taken to safety in Great Britain in 1939, by means of rail expeditions, which became known historically as the “Winton trains”. Also present in the hall, was the English citizen Nicolas Winton, 101 years old, who had organized the rescue feat in Nazi occupied Prague, on the eve of the second world war. With him, were also a few other protagonists of that achievement – those who, when they were children, had got onto those trains – and who still feel as if they belong to a sort of enlarged family. It is believed that there are 5 thousand descendants of the so-called “Winton children”.
The film – which is a Czech Slovak co-production, also received the collaboration of Ceska televize, of the ministry for Defence of the Czech Republic and of the Slovakian ministry for Culture – it is the third film that the director Matej Mináč has dedicated to this sad event. The previous ones were “Síla lidskosti – La forza dell’umanità” in 2002 and “Všichni moji blízcí – Tutti i miei cari” in 1999.
Already decorated by the order of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (the highest honorary decoration of the Czech Republic), by the then president Vaclav Havel and, nominated Knight of the Crown by the English Queen, Winton has once again, this year, been proposed for the Nobel Prize for peace, with a petition signed by more than 100 citizens and handed to the Norwegian ambassador in Prague.
The story of the film is well known. Winton was a young Stock Exchange broker, not yet in his thirties, who reached Prague after giving up a Christmas holiday on the Swiss Alps, following the invitation of a friend of his – an Englishman called Martin Blake, who worked in a rescue committee for refugees from Czechoslovakia, which had already been invaded by the Third Reich.
Winton booked a hotel in Wenceslaus square and soon realized how dramatic the situation was. In particular, he realized there was no plan to save the lives of those children, so it was for this purpose that he started to organize the rescue operations, above all, to find families willing to receive the little Czechoslovakian refugee children. On the whole, he managed to save 669 children, nearly all between the age of 6 and 12, most of them Jewish, but not only, because among them there were also children from families that had opposed German occupation and, as a consequence, were destined to be persecuted. In total, they managed to get eight trains out of Prague. However, the start of the war on first September 1939, made it impossible to send out yet another train, the fullest until then, the one that should have taken 250 more children to England.
The story of this man, defined as a British Schindler, was forgotten for fifty years and remained unknown until the 1980s. To discover the story, by chance, was his wife Greta who found a trunk in the attic of the house which contained old documents dating back to the last years of the 1930s. To why he had kept this event secret for so long – also within the family – Winton will reply: “I had the impression that I had done only something normal, nothing to boast about”, and without losing his sense of humour, he adds: “It is fair that every husband should maintain a few secrets”.
73 years on, since that incredible feat, we may speculate that there is another aspect, which until now has been neglected. A number of factors seem to indicate that Winton may have been a secret agent working for the London government, sent to Prague as an observer and then, probably, given the task of organizing the humanitarian mission – for which, of course, he deserves a name in history.
In 1938, Winton was not yet thirty years of age, but was far from a greenhorn. Before arriving in Prague, he had already worked abroad: in France, Paris and Germany, in Hamburg and Berlin, always as a stock-exchange broker.
However, a first clue is given to us by Winton himself when, in the documentary film, he says: “At that time, I knew things that ordinary people didn’t know and, this led me to act also with great solicitude”. The European intelligence services were in fact beginning to understand that after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s final objective was that of a large-scale war and the extermination of the Jews.
Another particular that makes us think of a possible spy story plot is the figure of Kirsten – a very beautiful Swedish girl who was agent of the Gestapo – who became a friend and perhaps even Winton’s lover for a few months. It was Kirsten, in fact, who sent 25 children away from Prague to take refuge in Sweden. In fact, on this particular issue, Winton replies with a joke: “Between Kirsten and I there was just a close friendship. She was very beautiful, it is true, but have you ever seen an ugly woman spy?”
Among his collaborators, there is also another figure that is not mentioned in the film. He was called Werner Theodore Barazetti, a Swiss citizen who died in 2000 and whose name is inscribed on marble at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum at Jerusalem, for his participation to the Jewish children rescue operations in Prague in 1939. The fact that Barazetti was an agent of the British secret service on a mission to Prague is one of the few certainties that we have on this personage.
Nicolas Winton – this elderly English gentleman, who used to be a proficient fencer, is now fond of playing bridge, but most likely, he was also one of His Britannic Majesty’s secret agents. All the elements for such an assumption seem to be true – but do play down on his achievement.
Nonetheless, it is quite surprising, though, that such supposition was neither contemplated in the film nor in any other reconstruction made in the Czech Republic of this memorable event.
By Giovanni Usai