Prague, Sept 15 (CTK) – Barbara Winton, daughter of the late Sir Nicholas Winton, received a postage stamp the Czech Post recently issued in honour of her father, the saviour of Jewish children, in Prague yesterday.
Winton, who saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children by helping them leave Czechoslovakia at the beginning of World War Two, died in early July at the age of 106.
When taking over the sheet of stamps, Barbara Winton said it was a touching moment for her, as only a few months have elapsed since the death of her father, who was agile until the last moment in spite of his high age.
She asked the Czech Post staff to give her some more stamps with Sir Winton’s portrait, which she would send on postcards from Prague to her husband, brother and children.
Barbara Winton said the launch of a stamp with her father’s portrait is a big honour for her.
The postage stamp designed by Zdenek Netopil was issued in 750,000 pieces on September 2.
In 1939, Winton (1909-2015) 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 left in 1939.
