The Stockbroker Who Chose 669 Children

In the winter of 1938, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled his skiing holiday and traveled instead to Prague. What he found in the refugee camps stunned him — thousands of Jewish families, displaced and desperate, with children who had nowhere to go. Winton was not a diplomat. He held no government office. He had no organization behind him. Yet he looked at those children and made a decision that defied every practical calculation.

Over the next nine months, Winton organized eight trains to carry 669 children out of Czechoslovakia to foster families in Britain. He forged documents, badgered bureaucrats, and personally guaranteed the welfare of each child. These were not the children of the powerful or the prestigious. They were the overlooked, the vulnerable, the ones the world had written off. Winton chose them anyway — not because of anything they could offer him, but because his heart would not let him walk away.

Moses told Israel something remarkably similar. "The Lord did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you" (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). God's choosing was never about Israel's size, strength, or merit. It was about the stubborn, inexplicable faithfulness of His love — a love that looks at the least and says, "You are Mine, and I am keeping My promise."