Thanks to YouTube and its incomprehensible algorithm, it's likely that you have seen the two-minute clip of the 1988 BBC show This is Your Life, where Nicholas Winton is celebrated by some of the children that he had saved from the Nazis in the lead-up to the Second World War.
The British stockbroker, who died in 2015 aged 106, ended up becoming a key figure in the 1938-1940 Kindertransport task force, which helped to transfer around 10,000 primarily Jewish children out of Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to Britain following Kristallnacht. His life story has now been made into a film, One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins.
Winton was personally responsibly for saving the lives of 669 Czechoslovakian children from the grip of the Nazis; many of the children that he saved were the only members of their families that survived the war. But he didn't make a song and dance about his contribution, and his story largely went unnoticed for 50 years.
One day his wife, Dane Grete Gjelstrup, found a notebook detailing his efforts, and sent the material to Holocaust researcher Elisabeth Maxwell. Letters were sent to the children whose addresses could be found, and this eventually led to the now famous episode of the BBC show.
Throughout his life, Winton's humanitarian work continued: in 1983 he was awarded an MBE, incredibly not for his wartime activity, but for working to establish care homes for the elderly. It was 20 exactly years later that he would be knighted for his WW2 contribution.
"I never thought what I did 70 years ago was going to have such a big impact as apparently it has," said Winton. "And if it has now got a story which helps people to live for the future, well, that would be an added bonus."
Here is everything to know about the British hero.
Who was Nicholas Winton?
Winton was born in Hampstead in 1909 to German Jewish parents, who had converted to Christianity. Leaving school without qualifications he became a stockbroker after a series of internships at banks in Germany and France. Despite being a banker, he was supposedly an ardent socialist. He was part of a left-wing group that was against appeasement, perceiving the real danger that Jews were facing in Europe.
"My family knew what was going on in Germany," wrote his daughter Barbara in her 2014 biography. "We’d had people who were being persecuted staying with us. We had families staying with us. We had refugees staying with us. We were being fed the whole time with what was going on, which was much more than the politicians were."
During the war Winton (whose family name had been anglicised from Wertheim) became a conscientious objector, instead choosing to volunteer with the Red Cross. However he changed his mind as the war proceeded, and in 1940 he joined the air force. By the end of the war he was ranked a Flight Lieutenant, having been promoted three times.
How did he become involved in the Kindertransport?
Just before Christmas in 1938, Winton went to Prague to help out his friend Martin Blake, who was working for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Winton spent a month volunteering for Jewish welfare efforts alongside the now celebrated humanitarians Trevor Chadwick and Beatrice Wellington, leaving weeks before Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany.
In Czechoslovakia he compiled a list of names of children there, most of whom were Jewish, who were already refugees, having fled from Nazi Germany.
After Kristallnacht, the House of Commons agreed to accept unaccompanied Jewish refugees under the age of 17 who had a place to stay. The children would only be accepted into the country if they provided a £50 deposit (about £3,500 in today's money) which would be returned when they eventually went back home. Back in London, Winton went about trying to fulfill all the legal obligations so that the children could be transported to London, such as making sure they all had homes to go to and raising funds to pay their deposits.
What happened?
It was not an easy job by any means: Winton, who was aided by his mother, put up advertisements and would write to the people who responded. He met rejection everywhere he went – people "considered his fears exaggerated or groundless", explained Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2009: Britain would only declare war on Germany in September 1939; the Holocaust was literally unimaginable.
But over the summer, thanks to his efforts (and initially using his own money), appeals from campaign groups, collaborations with task forces in Czechoslovakia and volunteer organisations across Europe, and with the input of influential individuals such as German Jewish businessman Wilfrid Israel, the Kinderstransport went ahead. Winton – who ran the Children department of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia – was responsible for organising the transportation of 669 of the 10,000 children who would be arrive from Europe between December 1, 1938 and September 1, 1939 (from Germany) and from May 14, 1940 (from the Netherlands).
Winton would often repeat the motto: "If it's not impossible, there must be a way to do it."
Were his endeavors immediately recognised?
No – the Kindertransport ended just as the war for Britons was beginning, and the nation was wholly focused on the war effort. Winton himself would spend five years in the RAF.
After the war, he worked for the International Refugee Organisation, then at the Paris branch of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where he met his wife, before they eventually moved back to the UK. They had three children, the youngest of whom, Robin, died from meningitis when he was six years old. Robin was born with Down's syndrome and Winton and his wife refused to let him be sent to a special home, as was the usual practice at the time.
After the war, Winton rarely spoke about his heroic efforts, and later, when he was outed by his wife, he rebuffed the attention. "I wasn’t heroic because I was never in danger," he said to The Guardian in 2014, when he was 104.
"It turned out to be remarkable,” he continued, speaking about the 669 lives he saved. "But it didn’t seem remarkable when I did it."
This is Your Life
A 1988 episode of the BBC's This Is Your Life detailed the impact of Winton's wartime undertaking, finally making him, five decades later, a household name. 41 million people have watched the moving video since it was uploaded to YouTube 14 years ago. It's above, but we don't want to ruin it for you; there's just one tip: ready your tissues!
One Life: the new film, starring Anthony Hopkins
Now Winton's remarkable story has been turned into a drama starring Anthony Hopkins as the older Winton and Johnny Flynn (Lovesick, Stardust) as the younger version. The new film, directed by James Hawes (Enid, 2009), also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Jonathan Pryce and Romola Garai.
"Honestly, anyone who doesn’t blub their way through the entire last half an hour should be checked for a pulse on the way out," said the Standard in its five-star review. "Hopkins, as Nicholas Winton, imbues every frame he is in with warmth and wit and sadness and charming British eccentricity. He switches effortlessly between moments of genuine, laugh-out-loud levity (including a wonderful use of ‘twit’ when describing a newspaper editor) and what are by far the most moving scenes in any film this year." We've popped the trailer at the top of the page.
