Nicholas Winton

You realize that your life is taken to levels and to spiritual... levels of consciousness, I would say, that you yourself could never reach.

I don't know if you're familiar with the story of Nicholas Winton.

Nicholas Winton was a hero.

He was a stockbroker in 1938.

And he had planned a vacation in Switzerland.

But instead, he said to his friend, I'm coming.

He went to Czechoslovakia, and he organized what's called Kindertransports, transports of children to Great Britain.

These children were abandoned, found their home thanks to Nicholas Winton in Great Britain on top of the families, and he had saved altogether 660 children.

Amazing.

Or did you see, I've forgotten the name of the film, One Life with Nicholas Winton.

Do you see that? Nicholas Winton who saved a load of Czechoslovakian children during the Second World War from being exterminated.

And again, 5,000 people can trace their heritage back to Nicholas Winton's salvation of them.

How many can trace their salvation back to the work of Schiffer and Puerh? Millions, right? Quiet heroes.

What do they do that's so great? They fear the Lord and do the right thing.

It once belonged to the Jewish industrialist Placek family.

Before the Second World War, the parents managed to send their two children to Britain on one of the transports organized with the help of British diplomat Nicholas Winton.

The children survived, their parents stayed behind and were later murdered in the Holocaust.

More than 80 years later, their descendants, coming from several countries, gathered outside the family's former home to place small brass memorial stones in the pavement and remember them in a moving ceremony.

Will not watch.

One of our listeners, Steve, is watching One Life, a movie about Nicholas Winton, saved refugee children from Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Um...

Apparently it's a brilliant film, but he must be watching it on one of the channels or on the playback because he says there are endless government ads for the census follow-up.

He didn't even suffer major burns despite the horrific incident.

So inspired by this story of people becoming heroes by circumstance, unwittingly, waking in the morning, not planning to have done anything heroic or untoward or anything bordering on remarkable, Things happen.

Life has a way of intervening, which is very different from your Nicholas Wintons of the world who actually embarked and set about as a concerted effort, a mission, a plan to save as many children, Jewish children, as he could from certain death when it came to the Holocaust.

But there's some interesting stories emerging about that, so watch this space, listen to this space, and you'll hear more about it.

I noticed that AI takes a very firm grip on our lives.

In December of 1938, Nicholas Winton packed for a skiing holiday and ended up instead in a Prague hotel room, facing a line of parents with one request each.

Take my child.

Winton was a London stockbroker.

For 50 years, he told no one.

A notebook with the names of 669 children sat in his attic until the late 1980s, when his wife found it and brought it to the BBC.

On a television program called That's Life, the host turned to the studio audience and asked, is there anyone here whose life was saved by Nicholas Winton? The entire room stood.

He was sitting in the front row, holding his hat on his knees.

Historians later worked out that those 669 children left behind roughly 15,000 descendants.

And also this is the na- This is the, uh...

There is the famous story of, um, Sir Nicholas Winton from, uh, the UK who rescued, uh, 669 kids during the Holocaust and moved them w- from Czechoslovakia with trains to, uh, to the UK, and he got the, the title of, uh, a Sir, thanks to that.

Um, and yeah, th- th- this is, uh, this is basically, uh, the, the reason for the name.

Yeah, I love that.