MUNICH AGREEMENT
The Munich Conference was held September 29-30, 1938, following
Hitler's demand to annex the
Sudetenland, a region in Czechoslovakia
populated largely by ethnic Germans. The resulting crisis led Britain and
France, who had adopted a policy of appeasement, to pressure Czechoslovakia
to accede to Hitler's demands. No Czech representative was present at the
conference, and the agreement led to the destruction of the Czech state.
Following the conference,
Winston Churchill warned:
"Do not
suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning."
OPERATION KINDERTRANSPORT
On December 2, 1938, Jewish and Christian agencies began rescuing German and Austrian
Jewish children on Kindertransporten (children's transports).
The "Refugee Children's Movement," a group under the auspices
of the Central British Fund for German Jewry or CBF (which later became
the World Jewish Relief organization), urged concerned Christians
and Jews to support "Operation Kindertransport." An extensive
fund-raising effort was organized and the British public
responded generously, raising half a million British pounds in six
months. A large portion of this money was used to care for the children
who were rescued. Between December 1938 and May 1940, almost 10,000
children (infants to teenagers) were rescued and given shelter at farms,
hostels, camps, and in private homes in Britain. However, this effort
did not include the children of Czechoslovakia; and this is why the
work of Nicholas Winton was so vital.
http://www.powerofgood.net/story.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Winton
Winton humbled by children's gratitude
Czech children collect
signatures to nominate British knight for Nobel Peace Prize
Posted: October 24, 2007
By Eva Munk
In his long life, Sir Nicholas Winton, 98, has received many honors,
including a knighthood, a planet named after him, and a recent U.S.
Congressional resolution for saving 669 children from the Holocaust.
But Czech children still aren’t satisfied.
Over 2,500 students from around the country gathered Oct. 9 in the
huge Communist-era assembly hall of the Prague Congress Palace to honor
him as only young people can.
After watching “The Power of Good,” Slovak director Matěj Mináč’s
film about Winton, the children gave him a three-minute standing
ovation.
“This is scarier than anything I ever did in the war,” Winton said, addressing the crowd.
Then the students presented a petition to Foreign Minister Karel
Schwarzenberg, with over 32,000 signatures, nominating Sir Nicholas for
the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I’m embarrassed that school children thought of it before I did,”
Schwarzenberg said, adding that he had already sent off a letter to the
Nobel Commission in Stockholm.
“I think the Nobel Prize is for people of a completely different
caliber,” Sir Nicholas told the crowd in characteristically modest
fashion.
Winton came to Czechoslovakia for the first time in December of 1938,
just after the German annexation of the Sudetenland. The 29-year-old
stockbroker had traveled to Berlin often in the preceding year. He knew
about Hitler’s megalomaniacal expansion plans — and what fate he had in
store for the Jews.
As Winton watched thousands of Jewish refugees pour into Prague, he
realized that something had to be done to save the most vulnerable of
them: the children.
When Winton went back to Britain, he started pounding on Foreign
Ministry doors. At first his pleas fell on deaf ears — after all, this
was only a few months after Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of “peace
in our time.” Even America refused to take in the children.
But eventually he wrested a commitment from Britain and Sweden to
accept the pint-sized Czechoslovak refugees. The catch was that the
British government required that every child should have a British
family willing to adopt them — and to pay 50 pounds ($100/2,000 Kč) to
do it — a huge sum in those days.
Winton went back to Prague where thousands of frantic Jewish parents
were soon entrusting their children to his care. For each of these
children, Sir Nicholas tried to find a family in Britain and push the
necessary paperwork through the painfully slow British Foreign Ministry
pipeline.
“They were infuriating. They kept asking me, ‘What’s your rush?’”
Winton recalled. But undaunted, with only a handful of volunteers, he
knew he was working against time and Hitler’s armament to get the
children out of the country.
Between March and September of 1939 Winton managed to save 669
children. Six trains left Prague, but the seventh, largest train, with
over 200 children, never left the station. It was scheduled to leave on
Sept. 1 — the same day World War II broke out. Typically for Sir
Nicholas, 60 years later, he takes this failure to heart much more than
the previous successes.
After those frantic months, Winton never bragged about what he had done in Prague — he just got on with his life.
Realizing he could do no more in Czechoslovakia, Winton went on to
drive an ambulance for the Red Cross and train fighter pilots for the
Royal Air Force in France. Because he wanted to join as a pilot he
already had a pilot’s license, but they wouldn’t take him because of his
thick glasses, which he wears to this day.
“I guess you could say that they saved my life,” he said.
After the war, Winton got a job with the International Refugee
Organization in Paris, where he was in charge of liquidating the huge
store of valuables which the Nazis had confiscated from the Jews, the
proceeds of which went to the IRO. He would often find himself escorting
truckloads of gold bullion across France alone, with only a driver.
Later, while working at the International Bank in Paris, he met Grete
Gjelstrup, a Danish secretary. He approached her with his usual aplomb.
Sparks fly
“He sat down on the edge of her desk and calmly asked her to take a
letter for his mother in Britain,” said his son, Nick Winton. “Well, she
just thought this was completely out of line.”
But the future Mrs. Winton eventually agreed to marry him and raise a
family. They brought their children up with a mixture of old-fashioned
firmness and understanding.
“Father wasn’t all that young when we were born, and he was quite
strict in the way he brought us up,” said Winton’s daughter Barbara
Watson. “When there were guests, we were expected to come down and
converse with them properly… And when I was going through my own teenage
rebellion, I remember we would disagree a lot. Then, one day, he gave
me a box of chocolates and said ‘I know we don’t always agree with what
you do, but we don’t want to lose you because of it.’ ... I try to
remember that now that my own children are the age I was then.”
Always eager to explore new things, Winton never stuck with one job
for long. During his long life, among other things, he owned an
ice-cream company.
“It was lovely. We could come home from school and have any flavor of ice cream we wanted,” Barbara recalls. “We felt so lucky.”
After moving to Maidenhead, England, Winton became an active member
of the Rotary Club. The birth of his son, Robin, in 1956, with Down’s
syndrome got Winton involved in charity work. Contrary to the
conventional wisdom of the day, he and Grete didn’t put Robin in an
institution, but kept him at home until he died in 1962.
“He was a lovely kid — very loving and affectionate. Father was so
appalled at the level of understanding and advice that he got involved
in Mencap,” Nick said.
Later, Winton turned his attention to helping the elderly, and today
he still helps raise money to build Abbeyfield retirement homes in his
region. It was for this work that he received his first award, a Member
of the British Empire.
In 1988, when cleaning out the attic, Grete came across a trunk full
of pictures of Jewish children. When she asked her husband about them,
he told her, “That’s ancient history, get rid of them.”
Instead, she brought them to the attention of Elizabeth Maxwell, the
widow of media magnate Robert Maxwell and, 50 years after the fact,
Winton’s deeds came to light.
Suddenly, to his dismay, Winton found himself in the public eye.
After Grete died, in 1999, he had to face the glare of publicity alone.
That publicity led to a resolution from the U.S. Congress in September to honor him.
“I felt the US had not done the right thing back in 1939 and I wanted
to do something to make up for it,” said Peter Rafaeli, the Czech
honorary consul in Philadelphia, who initiated the resolution.
And when Winton’s son and daughter accompany him abroad, they are always surprised at the sensation his presence causes.
“
At home nobody makes a fuss about him, and then we come to Prague and find out he’s a hero,” Barbara says.
Winton continues to insist he is not.
“I was never in danger,” he says. “I simply saw a need and filled it.”
Seventy years, one knighthood and several international awards later,
Winton is convinced that the huge organizational effort that went into
his deed was perfectly natural.
“There is nothing that is fundamentally reasonable that can’t be done,” he likes to say.
The Czech teenagers finally broke through Sir Nicholas’ sangfroid. In
the grand finale, as two orchestras and the girl’s choir, Bambini di
Praga, sang a song that was written for him called “Angels Among Us,”
2,500 cell phones lit up like an army of fireflies, and started swaying
to the tune.
Onstage, Sir Nicholas’ thick glasses started to mist over.
Postscript: Thursday, Oct. 11, after visiting Forum 2000 in Prague as
a guest of honor, meeting President Václav Klaus and an honors ceremony
at the British Embassy, Sir Nicholas Winton was taken to Prague’s
Faculty Hospital. Winton was flown home by military airplane last week,
and he is apparently out of danger.
Eva Munk can be reached at features@praguepost.com
http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.praguepost.cz%2Farchivescontent%2F4488-winton-humbled-by-children-039-s-gratitude.html&date=2013-11-19
4/28/14 Update: Check out CBS 60 Minutes recent coverage on Sir Nicholas Winton
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-the-children-on-eve-of-world-war-11-60-minutes/
