For decades, Nicholas Winton’s son Nick knew his father had done something during the 1930s and that a scrapbook of old photos in a steel trunk had something to do with it.
But in 1988, he learned the astonishing truth that his father was a version of Oskar Schindler and had saved hundreds of Jewish children from certain death under the Nazis.
The secret only emerged because his mother found the scrapbook — which contained the names of the rescued kids and photos and letters from their families — leading to a British TV show running a “This is Your Life”-style reunion of Nicholas Winton and dozens of the children he had saved.
“Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?” said the anchor, with Winton looking shocked as almost everyone stood up. He had no idea the show would be about him and had never met those he had rescued, so modest was he.
A clip of the reunion regularly goes viral. Now the full extent of Winton’s secret heroism is being told in a new movie, “One Life,” starring Anthony Hopkins as Winton, out in theaters Friday.
It reveals Winton’s twin stories — both his mission to save children he knew were in danger, and how the TV reunion led to Queen Elizabeth making him a knight and more poignantly, to him forming deep bonds with those he had rescued.
“I owe him three children, three grandchildren, a great-grandchild and a new one about to arrive,” Eva Paddock, 87, told The Guardian. She was 3 when she left with her sister Milena, 9, on a Kindertransport.
“None of that would have happened without him. He was an amazing man — how many families would not be here to tell the tale otherwise?” she said.
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Trains to safety
Winton was born Nicholas Wertheim in 1909 to British parents from German-Jewish families, who Anglicized their last name to Winton during World War I. His background, said his son, meant that he “must have been much more sensitive than most to the unfolding landscape.”
In December 1938, he was a 29-year-old British stockbroker who was supposed to be going skiing when a friend urged him instead to go to Prague. Hitler’s Germany had just annexed Czechoslovakia’s largely German-speaking Sudetenland, and refugees, many Jewish, were fleeing to Prague.
Winton committed himself to organizing a Kindertransport — a rescue of children — to Britain, by train. He needed to find a foster family and a £50 guarantee (the equivalent of $5,300 today) for each child handed into the arms of strangers in Britain.
He also had to lobby the government to let Czechoslovak children, as well as those with German passports, into the country.
But with the help of his mother, Babette, played in the movie by Helena Bonham Carter, and two others — Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick — he managed more than one Kindertransport.
In fact, he brought 669 children to safety in Britain in eight Kindertransports, perilous journeys with some of the children just babies, all suddenly separated from their families and on trains that went through Germany.
Not all the children were Jewish. Some were the kids of politicians and activists whom he believed would be key Nazi targets.
But for the next 50 years, Winton’s intense months of work to save the innocents from Hitler became a memory — and one he never discussed with his family. All they knew about was a scrapbook.
“The scrapbook itself was just something he did before the war,” says Nick Winton, 71, who regularly speaks about his father’s legacy. “It didn’t mean anything to me at all.”
That all changed in 1988, on the show called “That’s Life,” whose anchor Esther Rantzen turned to Winton and told him two people he was sitting between were among those he had saved.
Winton had thought he had been invited to be a fact-checker for a segment on World War II, in which he served in the Royal Air Force.
Nick says it took his father “a long time to forgive Rantzen” for the emotional “ambush.” But the moment of 24-karat TV gold was still to come, when she reunited him with dozens of children he had saved.
The scene is one of many tear-jerking moments in the movie, which is directed by James Hawes, a former researcher on the show.
But Winton’s son said that he found being portrayed as a hero difficult because of the 250 children who had not made it out in time.
His ninth, and largest, transport was booked to leave on Sept. 1, 1939. But that day, Germany invaded Poland and the borders were sealed. It is thought almost all of those children were murdered in Auschwitz.
It was this sense of loss — not the miraculous rescue of the 669 mostly Jewish children he did help save — that was uppermost in Winton’s memories.
“He felt that he was being built up as this saintly figure,” says Nick. “He was just an ordinary man doing ordinary work,” though one “primed to recognize the impending catastrophe.”
Nick — who has seen the film about six times, “and I weep every time” — says his father “was brought up with a troubleshooting outlook.”
‘A great deal of goodness’
Winton was keen to stress that despite his garlanding — as well as being knighted in Britain he was declared a national hero in the Czech Republic and honored by Israel — he did none of his work alone.
He particularly credited Trevor Chadwick, who “did the more difficult and dangerous work after the Nazis invaded . . . he deserves all praise.”
Chadwick, played by Alex Sharp, was a Latin teacher who was dispatched by his uncle, the headmaster, to chaperone two Jewish boys to the UK. He barely spoke of what he did before his death in the 1970s; in a scant two-page account, he said: “I shall always have a feeling of shame that I didn’t get more out.”
Chadwick’s son Charles, 91, told The Post, “He only did what other people could have done. All one can say is that the human spirit is capable of a great deal of goodness given half the chance.”
Doreen Warriner, who died in 1972 and is portrayed by Romola Garai in the film, focused on organizing the escape of anti-Nazi activists.
She became the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia’s representative and sent exasperated letters to London newspapers that almost got her fired. Refugees needed “visas not chocolate,” she wrote.
Her nephew, Henry Warriner only learned of her efforts from an obituary in The Times of London.
“I was amazed, I was shocked,” he said, and subsequently wrote a biography, “Doreen Warriner’s War.”
Winton died in 2015, aged 106, on the 76th anniversary of the departure of the train carrying the largest number of children, 241. He had become a friend of many of those he had saved.
At least 6,000 people, possibly many more, are descended from the children saved by Britain’s Oskar Schindler.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
