Knighted in 2002, Sir Nicholas, who lives in the south of England, has also received recognition in the Czech Republic, where he is lauded as a hero. But there are those who believe his compassion deserves the highest humanitarian award of all, the Nobel Peace Prize. Pupils at the Open Gate School, an English-speaking institute in Prague, are mounting a campaign to secure the prize for the Englishman before it is too late. Its online petition has so far attracted 195,000 signatures.

“Our aim is to spread the story of Nicholas Winton,” says David Nitsche, one of the teachers at Open Gate. “He did something he did not have to do, to help people he did not know. Winton’s list has the same weight as Schindler’s list, but not many people know about it.”

There is competition, however. A record 259 nominations have been received for this year’s Peace Prize, the winner of which will be announced in Oslo in October. They include Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to promote education for females in her country. Winton, the oldest-ever candidate for the award, faces the youngest-ever nominee.

One thing is for sure: Winton would never promote himself for any honour. Even his family were unaware of his work in Czechoslovakia, until a clear-out of his loft uncovered a list of those saved.

“Nicholas is a very modest person and he insists on pointing out that he was only part of a team,” says Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, who as Milena Fleischmann fled Czechoslovakia on a Winton train. “But he found the foster families in Britain and raised the money and made the whole thing possible.”

Winton’s family was, in fact, Anglicised German-Jewish, his relatives having moved to Britain in the 19th century. Left-leaning, he was not religious and had no time for those who complained that Jewish children were being placed in Gentile homes, pointing out that his job was to save lives and that all other considerations were secondary.

Lady Grenfell-Baines, widow of the architect Sir George Grenfell-Baines, remembers leaving Prague aged nine with her younger sister. “The little ones, obviously, were very upset,” she says. “The parents were heroes because none of them let on that this was in all probability the final goodbye. We sat in the carriage and held hands, saying together, ‘We are not going to cry.’”

Milena was more fortunate than most. Her father, a prominent opponent of the Nazis, had already fled to Britain, and her mother subsequently managed to escape Occupied Czechoslovakia on a Norwegian passport.

The Rev John Fieldsend, born Hans Heinrich Feige, is a retired Anglican vicar, having converted from Judaism as a young man. He escaped Prague at the age of seven with his older brother Gert, leaving behind his mother Trude and father Curt. The Feiges, a German-Czech Jewish family, had fled to Czechoslovakia from Germany in 1937 only to find themselves again under threat.

“By April 1939 my parents realised the game was up, and my father sat my brother and me down and told us we were going on a long journey,” he recalls. He and Gert soon found themselves standing on a station platform, one small suitcase each, saying farewell to their mother. “As it came time to leave, she took off her wristwatch and gave it to us,” he remembers. “For us it was a mixture of fear and adventure – we didn’t really understand.”

Terrible choices had to be made by Winton and his colleagues. Hundreds of families were begging for help but the young Englishman had to contend with the ponderous bureaucracy in Whitehall. As time slipped away, Winton took to issuing forged Home Office entry permits.

“The problem was getting the people who would accept the children,” he later recalled. “It’s marvellous that so many people did come forward. The unfortunate thing was that no other country would help. I tried America but they didn’t take any.”

The future writer Vera Gissing left Prague on a Winton train on June 30, together with her sister and 239 other children. Describing a last glimpse of her doomed parents, she wrote: “The scene at Prague station will be with me forever. The forced cheerfulness of my parents – their last words of love, encouragement and advice. Until that moment, I felt more excited than afraid, but when the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my beloved mother and father could no longer mask their anguish.”

John Fieldsend had never seen the sea before his crossing from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. His destination was Sheffield and the home of Leslie Cumpsty, a colliery manager, and his wife, Vera. Gert had been allocated to another family, as was common – most foster families being unable to support more than one child.

The pain of separation from parents was put to one side as the children adapted to their new lives. “At that age you just want to get on with life, to bury the past in a big black hole,” says John. “I learnt English in eight weeks and forgot German in eight weeks. We were able to correspond for a week or two with our parents via the Red Cross, but then nothing.”

The Cumpstys remained hopeful that their foster child’s parents might yet escape the Nazis. “They said, ‘If your parents survive we do not want you to have to choose who are your parents, so we are not going to be your parents. We will be Auntie Vera and Uncle Les.’ Their son was seven months older than me and we were good mates. If we got into trouble I would get a reprimand and he would get a hiding; if we did something good I would get a thank-you and he would get a hug and a kiss. It must have affected me, but I understood.”

Fieldsend was a teenager when a package arrived in 1946. Someone, he does not know who, had discovered a collection of photograph albums in his grandparents’ house in Czechoslovakia, and asked the International Red Cross to find the rightful owner. Inside one album, filled with photographs of a disappeared world, was a letter from his parents. “Dear Boys,” wrote Trude, “When you receive this letter the war will be over. We want to say farewell to you who were our dearest possession in the world.”

The letter went on to detail the deportations of relatives, and then: “In December [1942] it will be our turn, and the time has therefore come for us to turn to you again and to ask you to become good men and think of the years we were happy together. We are going into the unknown. Not a word is to be heard from those already taken.”

There was a separate passage from Curt. “We too won’t be spared and will go bravely into the unknown with the hope that we shall yet see you again when God wills. Don’t forget us and be good. I too thank all the good people who have accepted you so nobly.”

Now 81 and a retired clergyman living in the Home Counties, John Fieldsend still speaks with a slight accent, a soft blend of Saxony and Yorkshire. He tries to recall his father, whom he believes died with his mother in Auschwitz. “He was very quiet and always had a sad face. I think he saw what was coming. My parents worked very hard to protect us – we had a happy childhood.”

Tragedy attended the end of the Czech Kindertransport. On September 1 1939, a final train with 250 children on board was about to leave Prague when it was halted on the platform. Hitler had invaded Poland and all the borders of the Reich had been sealed. Not one of the children on that train survived the war.

Millions more died with them in the Holocaust, but 669 young lives had been saved by Nicholas Winton. A drop in the ocean, but a precious one.

To sign the Open Gate School online petition go to: change.org/petitions/nobel-prize-committee-award-sir-nicholas-winton-the-nobel-peace-prize