Nicholas Winton Spring, Prague,
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ToRo61
N 50° 05.139 E 014° 23.514
33U E 456497 N 5548331
Nicholas Winton - a British Hero of the Holocaust
Waymark Code: WMDTWK
Location: Hlavní město Praha, Czechia
Date Posted: 02/24/2012
Views: 93
In 1939, the English stockbroker Nicholas Winton (
visit link) rescued 669 Czech children from their doomed fate in the Nazi death camps, but his achievement went unrecognised for more than half a century. For fifty years most of the children did not know to whom they owed their lives. The story of Nicholas Winton only emerged when his wife Greta came across an old leather briefcase in an attic and found lists of the children and letters from their parents. He hadn't even told her of his role during the war.
Nicholas Winton, then a 30-year-old clerk at the London stock exchange, visited Prague, Czechoslovakia, in late 1938 at the invitation of a friend at the British Embassy. When he arrived, the British team working in newly erected refugee camps asked him to lend a hand.
In nine months of campaigning as the war crept closer, Nicholas Winton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains, Prague to London (a small group of 15 were flown out via Sweden). The ninth train - the biggest transport - was to leave Prague on September 3, 1939, the day Britain entered the war - but the train never left the station. 'Within hours of the announcement, the train disappeared,' Winton later recalled. 'None of the 250 children on board was seen again.
Nicholas Winton, one of the unsung heroes of World War II, known as the Schindler of Britain, is still revered as the father who saved scores of his 'children' from Nazi death camps.
You can find this spring close to Strahov monastery. This place offers superb views over Prague and Prague Castle too.