Prague, Sept 2 (CTK) – A stamp issued in honour of Sir Nicholas Winton (1909-2015) who saved hundreds of Jewish children from former Czechoslovakia from death in concentration camps was presented by the Ceska posta (CP) post yesterday.
The stamp called Honour to Sir Nicholas was designed by painter and graphic artist Zdenek Netopil. It features Winton with the saved children at the time when he was taking them to safety in the background.
The stamp was issued in 750,000 pieces. The first sheets were also bought by some of the people whom Winton protected in their childhood. Six of them signed an enlarged model of the stamp that will be exhibited in the Postal Museum in Prague.
A series of stamps to commemorate Winton, who died at the age of 106 in July, will be issued by his native country, Britain, next year.
In 1939, Winton saved 669 Czechoslovak Jewish children by organising their transport by trains from the then Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Britain. The first train with the children left Prague in May 1939. The last one, with 250 children, was to depart on September 1, 1939, but the Nazis forbade its departure as the war broke out in the meantime.
Sir Winton received the highest Czech state decoration, the Order of the White Lion, last October. Czech civic groups repeatedly promoted his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Winton has been presented with a number of British and Czech awards and he has been knighted. In 1998, former Czech president Vaclav Havel presented him with the Order of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and in 2010 he received the Hero of the Holocaust medal from former British prime minister Gordon Brown.
A monument to Sir Winton has been put up at Prague’s Main Railway Station, from which the trains with the Jewish children he saved were leaving in 1939.
