Fifty Years of Quiet Faithfulness

In the winter of 1938, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled a skiing holiday to travel to Prague. What he found — refugee camps filled with Jewish families desperate to save their children from the Nazi threat — changed his life. Over the next nine months, Winton organized eight trains that carried 669 children to safety in Britain, arranging foster families, travel documents, and funding for each one.

Then he told no one.

For fifty years, Winton went back to ordinary life — working, raising a family, growing old in anonymity. In 1988, his wife Greta discovered a scrapbook in their attic listing every child's name. The BBC program That's Life!, hosted by Esther Rantzen, invited Winton to sit in the studio audience. Rantzen told the story, then turned to the woman beside him — Vera Gissing, one of the children he had saved. When Rantzen asked if anyone else in the audience owed their life to Winton, dozens of men and women rose to their feet.

He had no idea they would be there.