Nicholas Winton and the human cost of “peace for our time”
The 2023 film One Life with Anthony Hopkins tells the story Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children in Prague just before the outbreak of World War Two. I was lucky enough to spend a day with Sir Nicholas back in 2007. I made a radio documentary bringing together his memories with those of some of the “children” he rescued, all of them by that time in their 70s and 80s.
I was working on a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the Munich crisis of 1938 when I went to see Sir Nicholas Winton at his home near Maidenhead, just west of London. It was summer 2007 and Sir Nicholas was 98. At his suggestion we went for lunch and a beer at the local pub. He was more interested in talking about the present day than the distant past – he was deeply unhappy at the prejudices being faced by Poles working in the nearby industrial town of Slough, and he was interested in hearing what I felt about Tony Blair’s role in the invasion of Iraq. It was only with some nudging that I managed to change the subject to the months leading up to the Second World War, a time when he was responsible for saving the lives of 669 mainly Jewish children in Prague. The BBC documentary is no longer available online, but here is a programme I made at the same time for Radio Prague. As well as Sir Nicholas Winton, it features three of his “children” Susanne Medas, Alice Klímová and Ruth Rulcová as well as the Prague writer Lenka Reinerová.
The Human Cost of Peace for Our Time
Austerlitz
The moving story of the Kindertransports has inspired a number of films and books. One of the most powerful is the award-winning novel Austerlitz, by the German writer W.G. Sebald, who, until his death in 2001, had lived for more than thirty years in England. The book is partly set in Prague.