The Stockbroker Who Searched for the Lost Children

In December 1938, twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas Winton canceled his ski holiday and traveled to Prague. Jewish families were desperate, their children in grave danger as Nazi occupation loomed. No government was coming. No organization was mounting a rescue.

So Winton went himself.

He set up a makeshift office at a hotel dining table. Parents lined up for blocks, pressing photographs of their children into his hands, begging him to find safety for them. Over the next nine months, Winton organized eight trains that carried 669 children out of Czechoslovakia to foster families in Britain. He arranged travel permits, found homes, raised funds — one child at a time.

For fifty years, he told no one. His wife discovered a scrapbook in their attic in 1988 — lists of names, small photographs, the addresses where each child had been placed.