The Extraordinary Story of Nicholas Winton: The Man Who Saved 669 Children

HISTOIRE TV – TUESDAY, JUNE 27 AT 8:50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

He never considered himself a hero, yet he was nicknamed the “British Schindler”. Nicholas Winton organized the extraordinary rescue of 669 Czech and Slovak children, mostly Jews, between March and August 1939, on the eve of World War II.

What emerges from this documentary is the equally extraordinary modesty of this man, who died at the age of 106 on 1^is July 2015. “There are all kinds of things you don’t talk about, even to your family, he will explain, fifty years later, after his wife had discovered in their attic an old notebook with the names and photos of children. In fact, everything that had happened before the war no longer seemed important in view of the war itself. »

The man had literally passed over his story in silence, including to those close to him, until he was invited by the BBC, in February 1988, to participate in a program, in the presence of those he had saved children. In 1993, when the film was released in the United States Schindler’s List, by Steven Spielberg, Nicholas Winton was nicknamed the “British Schindler”. He will be knighted by the queen in 2002.

Drawn pictures

The film directed by Frédéric Tonolli escapes the classic black and white historical documentary, by mixing archive images, testimonies of survivors and reconstruction of scenes in drawn images.

A young banker in the City of London, from a Jewish family converted to Anglican Christianity, Nicholas Winton received from Prague, in December 1938, a call for help from a friend with whom he was preparing to go skiing in Switzerland: some 250,000 refugees from Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland region annexed by Hitler were crowded into camps in Czechoslovakia. Winton, 29, immediately went to the Czech capital. “In his hotel room, he becomes a forger, printer of false passports”, says the voiceover (by Marie Drucker). From dawn to nightfall, the trader welcomes families who want to save their children.

He returned to London with a list of 6,000 names and worked, not without difficulty, to mobilize politicians, the administration and the press to welcome them. Despite the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Reich in March 1939, he managed to charter eight trains at his own expense to bring 669 children out via the Netherlands. “A journey of no return for children who have become orphans” – without knowing. At Prague station, “everyone said, ‘See you soon'”recalls one survivor, Eva Paddock (née Fleischmann).

During the war, enlisted in the Royal Air Force, the young man continued to campaign for refugees. Afterwards, he spoke no more of this story. But he kept his photo album, the one his wife would find by chance half a century later at the bottom of an old suitcase. Until the end, Sir Winton refused the title of hero, because, he said, he had never been in danger. And, throughout his life, the man remained haunted by this ninth train of 250 children which was to leave Prague on 1^is September 1939… the day the Second World War broke out.