Nicholas Winton and the 669 Children

The tag around my neck said a number, not a name. My mother pinned it herself, her fingers cold as the platform stones, and she told me not to lose it no matter what happened between here and wherever the train was going. I was too young to understand why she was smiling and crying at once. I only understood the whistle, and the crush of other children with the same square of cardboard swinging against their coats, and the fact that she was not getting on.

Months before that morning, Prague had already begun to change shape around us. The Munich Agreement had handed the Sudetenland to Hitler in the autumn of 1938, and within weeks more than a hundred thousand people had come pouring across the rest of Czechoslovakia looking for a floor to sleep on. Camps went up that were never meant to hold what they held. I remember the smell of them before I understood what a refugee camp was — wet wool, boiled cabbage, too many bodies and not enough coal. My own family still had our flat, still had our furniture, but you could feel the ground tilting under everyone, Jew and gentile alike, waiting to see how far the tilt would go.

It was into that tilt that a young Englishwoman named Doreen Warriner had already stepped, arriving that October with nothing but a sense that Britain had betrayed the Czechs and a wish, as she put it herself, to do something about it. She worked for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, mostly trying to get political prisoners and adults out before the Gestapo lists caught up with them. Nobody was doing the same for the children. Not yet.

He arrived in the last days of that December, a stockbroker from London, thirty years old going on much older, brought over at the urging of his friend Martin Blake, a schoolmaster who had written to say: come and see this for yourself before you go skiing. His name, I would learn much later, had once been Wertheimer, changed by his own German Jewish family to sound safely, unremarkably English. He walked through the camps with Blake and came out the other side changed. He had already watched Kristallnacht burn through Germany's Jewish streets that November on the newsreels. He had already heard that Jewish organizations in Britain were pulling children out of Germany and Austria by the thousand on what people were calling the Kindertransport. What he saw in Prague told him nobody was doing it here, and that if nobody did, the children in front of him would not survive what was coming.

He did not ask permission first. That detail matters more than it sounds. He simply opened a Children's Section under the Committee's name, before anyone in London had agreed to let him, and began taking applications from a room in the Hotel Europa. Within days the queue outside his door stretched down the corridor and out onto the street. My mother stood in that queue for hours, holding my papers, holding my photograph, holding herself together while men and women around her did the same. Nobody spoke much. There was nothing to say to strangers that wasn't already written on your own face.

The office moved soon after to a proper address in central Prague, because a hotel room could not hold what was coming to it. Doreen Warriner was there. So was Trevor Chadwick. So was Martin Blake, moving between them. They took down names, ages, dates of birth, photographs pinned to forms with a pin that must have gone through a thousand small faces before the winter was over. I sat on my mother's lap while a stranger wrote my number into a ledger, and I remember being told to smile for the camera the way you smile for a birthday, and not understanding why my mother's hand was shaking on my shoulder while I did.

He went back to London almost at once, because the paperwork that mattered now was not in Prague. The British government would take unaccompanied children, but only against a guarantee of fifty pounds a head, money to ensure each child could one day be sent home again rather than become a burden on the state. Fifty pounds was not nothing in 1939. He had to raise it, family by family, stranger by stranger, and he had to find British households willing to open a spare room to a child who spoke no English and might arrive with nothing but a small case and a number pinned to a coat. He wrote letters to governments and embassies across the world asking for visas, for quotas, for anything. Almost all of them said no. Sweden said yes to a portion. Britain said yes, conditionally, and that conditional yes became the whole of the operation. By day he sat at his desk on the Stock Exchange floor, trading as he always had, because the work still had to pay for itself and for him. By evening and long into the night he became someone else entirely, writing letters, telephoning strangers, matching a child's photograph to a family's spare room by lamplight.

The first of us left by air, on the fourteenth of March, 1939. I was not on that flight — I would come later, by train — but I heard about it from the mothers still waiting in Prague, spoken of the way you speak of a door that has, against all expectation, opened. It left the day before the Germans came. On the fifteenth, the tanks rolled into Bohemia and Moravia, and the country that had issued our passports stopped existing in any form that could protect us. After that there was no flying anyone out. The trains would have to do it instead, crossing Germany itself, in plain sight of the country we were fleeing, all the way to the Atlantic coast, and then a ship across the water to England.

I boarded one of those seven trains that followed. I do not remember which month, only that it was warm enough to not need the coat I was wearing, and that I wore it anyway because my mother had sewn something into the lining she did not tell me about. The carriage smelled of other children's fear, which has its own smell, sharper than an adult's. Somewhere past the frontier the train slowed and German officials came through checking papers, and every child on that carriage went silent in a way children are not naturally silent, and then the train moved again, and somebody's mother's silence became somebody's held breath let out. We crossed into Holland, then onto a boat, the Channel gray and enormous under us, and none of us had ever seen so much water in our lives.