Arcadia England

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, an annual day of remembrance for those who perished through genocide. The date was chosen as this was the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, was liberated in 1945.

This year, the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day is "Ordinary People", so I wanted to share the story of a British man whose name is not widely known, but whose impact served as a bright light in a time of extreme darkness.

Nicholas Winton was a British stockbroker from Hampstead who had visited Czechoslovakia in 1938 and was shocked by what was happening in the region. Believing that Jewish children there were at a grave risk, he petitioned the British government, who had recently relaxed immigration laws to allow in a limited number of child refugees from Austria and Germany, to also accept children from Czechoslovakia. They agreed, provided each was matched with a family in the UK who would care for them and a £50 guarantee. This became known as the Kindertransport.

Winton and a team of volunteers set about finding families and raise funds to pay for travel and guarantees so that they could rescue as many children as possible. In total, 669 children were rescued. Another 250 were due to leave on the day war broke out - none was ever heard of again.

Today, many of the descendants of Kindertransport children live in London - while volunteering at a vaccine centre in 2021 I met one woman whose mother had come to the UK on one of the "Winton trains" at aged 8. This brought home the huge impacts of one man's actions: the tens of thousands who would not be alive today had their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents not been rescued, and the millions who were never born because of the holocaust they were fleeing.

Nicholas Winton was knighted in 2003 and also received the Order of the White Lion, the Czech Republic’s highest honour. There are small, understated memorials to this humble and unassuming man in Hendon and Maidenhead, and memorials to the Kindertransport on Prague and Liverpool Street stations.

His impact illustrated by a moving scene in a 1983 TV programme, That's Life, where, when the presenter asked for anyone in the audience who owed their life to Nicholas Winton to stand, all stood.