WHEN I FIRST met Nicholas Winton--before he was "Sir Nicholas" and widely revered for saving Jewish children from the Nazis--it did not go particularly well.
Winton, who died July 1 at the astonishing age of 106, had come to dinner at my parents' house in Bethesda, Md. It was 1996. Only a few years earlier, my mother first had learned of the role this man had played in rescuing her, then 14, and her two sisters from Nazi-infested Czechoslovakia and delivering them to safety in England.
Winton's role in organizing what came to be known as the Kindertransports didn't come to light until 1988, thanks to a BBC television program that connected him, for the very first time, with some of the 669 children who owed their lives to him. The following year, my mother and father met him in London at the first reunion of Kindertransport children.
At dinner, my parents were eager to hear details of how Winton, then a 29-year-old English stockbroker, had pulled off this miraculous feat. Before Winton arrived, my father, who had made his own narrow escape from Vienna in 1939, instructed me firmly that as a journalist--a trained professional--it was my job to draw Winton out on the subject.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
I did my best, but Winton, impeccably polite in that British way, sidestepped my questions until I finally had to stop. It was frustrating, but I ultimately had to respect his wish for privacy. My mother, now 90, remembers feeling the same way. But my father, who no longer is around to offer his version, was very angry with me. His desire to know was so powerful.
Fortunately, Winton and I would meet again, more than a decade later, when I went with my mother, then 83, and my then-10-year-old daughter to visit him at his home in England. He was a young man of 99 then, living on his own and still driving. We took him to lunch at a nearby pub that he warned us was "posh," and afterward he indulged me by letting me interview him for a piece that aired on NPR. He was humorous and trenchant. When I suggested that my mother was his "child," I was his grandchild, and my daughter was his great-grandchild, he took it kindly. But my daughter was the one who charmed him. I remember him promising her fine choices for "pudding" after lunch.
Thanks to that visit--as well as a memoir written by Winton's daughter, Barbara, If It's Not Impossible ..., with his cooperation--I have come to understand his reticence. In part, he simply was a private man, bewildered by the attention that was showered upon him and uncomfortable with the idea that a single episode in his life should define who he was. He also didn't think he deserved so much credit when others who worked with him and took far greater risks hadn't lived long nough to see their contributions recignized. And maybe he was haunted because he had failed to save another 250 children whose rescue was blocked by the Nazis on the very day if their departure. Nearly all are believed to have been killed.
As his fame escalated, Winton also became frustrated by distortions of the story that had taken hold--exaggerations and embellishments that he could not correct. "It becomes very difficult at times," he said with chagrin, "because every time the newspapers say anything, they add a little bit of their own. It makes me completely disbelieve in history."
In virtually every obituary, the story was relayed that Winton was so modest he never had told his wife about his role in arranging the Kindertransports. She had discovered a scrapbook in the attic, complete with lists and photographs of children who had been saved.
As the story goes, Winton told her to toss it out. "You can't throw those papers away," she responded, according to the version of the story that appeared even in Winton's New York Times obituary. "They are children's lives." She then set in motion the events that led to the BBC program in which Winton finally came face-to-face with dozens of the now-adult children.
It's a wonderful story, told, among other places, in The Power of Good, a 2002 documentary by Czech filmmaker Matej Minac. But it doesn't seem to be true. Winton told me that he long had believed the scrapbook, which was given to him by an associate who helped arrange the rescue, had historical value, and he had made efforts to find a proper home for it. For years, no one expressed interest. As his daughter, Barbara, writes in her book, he eventually showed it to historian Elisabeth Maxwell, who was married to Robert Maxwell, a flamboyant newspaper baron who also happened to be a Czech Jew. So a long article about the rescue was published in the Sunday Mirror on the same day that the scrapbook was featured as part of Winton's first appearance on the BBC in 1988, on a program called That's Life!
Winton had gone to the studio thinking the host would talk about the rescue while he sat anonymously in the audience. His wife, Crete, didn't even come along. "They really had no idea what was in store," Barbara would write later, describing the show as "the ambushing of an unsuspecting innocent." At home, her mother watched, "horrified," as Winton, who had been brought up to conceal his emotions, tried to wipe away tears discreetly as he was introduced to two of his "children," seated on either side of him.
Despite his genuine modesty, Winton deserved every accolade he got, which eventually included a knighthood. This is the unembellished story, as I understand it: In 1938, as he was about to leave for a ski vacation, a friend in Prague asked him to come and help with a burgeoning crisis there. Winton went and encountered desperate refugees--Jews and others--who had fled as the Nazis began to encroach on Czech territory.
Others already were at work--led by a remarkable woman named Doreen Warriner--to rescue dissidents who had made it to Prague but still were being tracked by Hitler's agents. Winton, well aware of the fate that awaited the Jews, encountered parents who were asking: If they could not be helped, might something be done for their children?
Having long known this story, I was surprised by the tears that sprang to my eyes when I read in Barbara's book of a letter that Winton wrote to his mother in January 1939, toward the end of what was supposed to be his two-week stay in Prague. He asked: "Could you go to the Immigration section of the Home Office and find out what guarantees are needed to bring a child into the country?" That simple sentence set in motion the events that led to the survival of my family and literally thousands of others who are alive today because Winton decided to take action. His motto, which he applied to humanitarian actions throughout his long life, was: "If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Once word got out that he was attempting to rescue children, parents lined up to see Winton at his hotel in Prague. He was stalked by Nazi agents, including a young woman working for the Red Cross who was a spy for the Germans. Winton soon returned to London and set about finding families to take in children. To his everlasting sorrow, other countries, including the U.S., refused to admit even one. Britain was willing to accept children, provided there were families willing to take them in and also put up 50 pounds--the equivalent of several thousand dollars today--to ensure that the child could return home after the war. As if there would be a home to which any of them could return.
Even after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, many of Winton's associates remained in Prague, notably an audacious man named Trevor Chadwick, who faced great personal danger to continue getting children onto the trains. He had a way of sweet-talking the local head of the Gestapo, as well as forging documents and doing whatever was necessary. Chadwick--who died in the 1970s, long before the story of the Kindertransports was saved from obscurity--is among those who Winton believed never got the credit they deserved.
How my grandparents ever thought to send their children away is, in itself, a miracle. They lived in a tiny speck of a village, in what is now Slovakia, more than 300 miles from Prague, and only recently had moved into a house with running water and electricity. They had no telephone. Through much of my mother's childhood, news was spread by a town crier. But my mother's uncle Heino had lived and worked in Berlin and had a firsthand look at the Nazi threat. Having moved to London, he learned of Winton's program and urged his sister--my grandmother Sidonia--to get her three girls out of the country.
The members of my family who stayed behind were sent to concentration camps. My mother's older cousin Linka, who lived across the border in Poland, watched as her 5-year-old daughter was ordered to walk onto a plank over a pit and then shot. Linka survived the war but ended her days in a mental institution. My grandparents, as they were packed onto a train headed to their deaths at the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland in 1942, surely were thankful that, three years earlier, they had tearfully sent their girls far away.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
So Winton was a great hero, however uncomfortable he might have been in that role. As time passed, he seemed to resign himself to the accolades. Survivors like my mother needed the connection to him, to find a ray of decency and courage in the black expanse of inhumanity. My mother observed how "Nicky" gradually reconciled himself with his fate. "He understood the whole thing," she says. "He understood that he was getting the glory for things that many others did. But if there hadn't been a Nicky Winton, none of us would have been saved."
The real reason that her father wanted her to write her book, Barbara Winton writes, was not so people would worship him as a hero or continue to look backward. The point, he felt, was that ordinary people should recognize that "they, too, can act ethicall