Prague, July 2 (CTK) – The story of Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 mainly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before WWII, shows how one person with courage and imagination can do something exceptional, U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Andrew Schapiro told CTK Thursday, in reaction to Winton’s death.
Schapiro said the world would miss Winton who died at the age of 106 years on Wednesday.
In 1939, Winton saved 669 Czechoslovak Jewish children by organising their transport by trains from the 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 Nazi forbade its departure as the war had broken out meanwhile.
Winton did most of it out of his own will, without the authorities’ aid and he remained modest and humble throughout whole his life, Schapiro said.
He added that Winton’s example reminds him, a civil servant, that sometimes one must have courage and take a risk to defend human rights.
However, Winton’s story has also a personal aspect for him, Schapiro said, recalling that his mother, her sister and brother escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Schapiro said he is grateful that people like Nicholas Winton existed in the world.
Schapiro’s mother, Raya Czerner Schapiro, came from a Jewish family in Prague which they fled in 1939. However, since her parents did not get enough departure permits from the Nazis to take all three children, they left with the youngest son, while Schapiro’s mother and her sister joined them only after the war broke out.
“His death of course saddens me, but his life inspires me,” British Ambassador to the Czech Republic Jan Thompson said on the embassy’s web site.
“Last year I met Sir Nicholas – or ‘Nicky’ as he had come to be known – at Prague Castle, when the Czech President paid him the highest honour by bestowing on him the ‘Order of the White Lion’,” she added.
“Most moving of all was Sir Nicholas’ extraordinary humility, as he paid tribute to those Czechs who had helped him to rescue the children, as well as to the British who had made room for them,” Thompson said.
“Though he kept his story largely to himself for 50 years, Sir Nicholas continues to inspire fresh generations,” she added.
“But while I am sad, I am also happy: that such a man lived, and that I had a chance to meet him,” Thompson said.
“He did the right thing, though not the easiest thing, and he sought no recognition. How different the world might be if we could all look back on our lives and say as much,” she added.
Winton has been presented with a number of British and Czech awards, and he has been knighted. In 1998, Czech president Vaclav Havel presented him with the Order of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. He also 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.
