Nicholas Winton Saves 669 Children

I stood at the window of the Alcron hotel room and watched the line stretch down the street. It was already past noon and the queue showed no sign of shortening. Mothers held children by the hand. Fathers clutched folded papers. Every few minutes someone new arrived at the end and the line inched forward another place.

Winton sat at the small table with a stack of forms. He asked each parent the same questions about age, health, and whether anyone in Britain had offered to take the child. I wrote the answers down while he spoke. The room smelled of damp wool and cigarette smoke. Outside, a tram rattled past on its tracks.

Martin Blake came in from the camps that afternoon. He had spent the morning trying to get more blankets issued. He told Winton the numbers were rising faster than anyone had counted. Winton nodded once and kept writing. Later Doreen Warriner joined us. She said the British Committee could not stretch its mandate to cover children. She looked at Winton and asked if he wanted to try.

He answered by sending a telegram to London asking for office supplies and guarantors. That night he worked at the desk until the bulb grew hot. I fell asleep on the spare bed with the sound of his pen still moving.

By the third day the parents had begun to wait overnight. Some brought blankets and sat on the pavement. Winton opened a second room down the corridor and hired a Czech typist. The applications came in faster than we could file them. He told me to number each one and note the date. We ran out of ink twice that week.

He left for London on the overnight train. Before he boarded he gave me a list of children whose medical papers were already complete. He said Trevor Chadwick would handle the next stage once the first group was cleared. I watched the train pull away and then walked back to the hotel to start another day of names.

In London he worked from his house in Hampstead. Each evening after the Stock Exchange closed he sat at the kitchen table and wrote letters. Foster homes arrived in small batches. Some people offered space for one child. Others wrote that they could manage two if the children were under eight. He kept a separate ledger for the fifty-pound bonds the government required.

I returned in February with a suitcase of new applications. The house was full of photographs. Children’s faces stared out from every surface. Winton moved them aside to make room for the fresh forms. He asked about the mood in Prague. I told him the German soldiers were already visible on certain streets. He made a note and reached for the telephone.

The first plane left on the fourteenth of March. Twenty children boarded in the early light. Their parents stood behind a rope at the airfield. No one waved until the plane was small. That same evening German troops entered Prague. The next morning the office was closed by order. We moved the remaining files to a private flat.