Nicholas Winton: The Scrapbook That Revealed a Rescue

In 1988, a TV show surprised an elderly Englishman: Nicholas Winton, sitting in the audience, was introduced to people he had helped rescue as children.

In a later appearance on the programme, the host asked a question - and more than two dozen people he had helped rescue stood up. They were there because of him.

Fifty years earlier, London stockbroker Nicholas Winton gave up a ski trip to visit Prague, and never looked away. In his evenings, Winton raised money and found foster families.

Between March and August 1939, eight transports carried about 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Prague to Britain.

When war began, the rescue stopped. Winton's effort stayed virtually unknown for nearly fifty years.

Then his wife Grete found a scrapbook from 1939 - photographs and a complete list of names. A television show reunited him with some of the children he had helped rescue.

Knighted in 2003, he died in 2015 at 106. In that later appearance, a room of people he had helped rescue stood for him.

Watch the short: https://youtu.be/MSi3YjTpGNo. New stories every week on Aha Lantern on YouTube. Animated with AI-generated illustrations and a synthetic narrator voice.

Sources: US Holocaust Memorial Museum; The Guardian interview.

More stories: Operation Mincemeat: A Dead Man Fooled Hitler · The Ghost Army of World War II · Iran Nuclear Question: The Ski Raid on Hitler's Heavy Water

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