http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10064216/The-unsung-British-hero-with-his-own-Schindlers-List.html
The unsung British hero with his own Schindler’s List
Nicholas Winton rescued hundreds of young Jews from the Nazis and is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. We meet some of the children he saved
The birthday party will be modest and understated, in keeping with the man. Sir Nicholas Winton is 104 tomorrow and naturally some of his children will be there to wish him well. Not only his blood offspring but those known as Winton’s Children – the ones he saved from near-certain death three-quarters of a century ago.
Nicholas – Nicky – Winton hates to be thought of as a hero, hates being compared with Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg, but he nevertheless deserves to be mentioned in the same breath.
In January 1939, the 30-year-old stockbroker from Hampstead abandoned a planned holiday to answer a call for help from a friend in Czechoslovakia engaged in saving Jews from the Nazis. For three weeks Winton worked in Prague, helping to prepare children for evacuation to Britain before returning to London to organise their resettlement.
Between March 1939, when Hitler invaded that part of Czechoslovakia not already ceded to Germany under the Munich Agreement, and the following August, he and a group of British humanitarians saved 669 children, mostly Jewish, from the extermination camps. Winton secured travel permits and foster homes, and obtained passage on trains taking unaccompanied minors through the heart of the Third Reich to salvation. Their parents, however, were left behind, the British government decreeing that only child refugees were to be permitted entry.