In December 1938, Nicholas Winton, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker, cancelled a ski vacation and went to Prague instead. What he found were refugee camps full of Jewish families who had fled the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement handed it to Hitler. The parents knew what was coming. Winton looked at their children and decided to get them out.
Over the next nine months, working from a dining room table, he organized the rescue of 669 children. He arranged foster families in Britain. He fought the Home Office for entry permits. He bribed, cajoled, and forged documents when the bureaucracy moved too slowly. He filled eight trains. A ninth, carrying 250 children, was scheduled for September 1, 1939 — the day Germany invaded Poland. The borders closed. None of those children survived.
Winton told no one. For fifty years. His wife found a scrapbook in their attic in 1988 — a list of names, a few photographs. The BBC tracked down the grown children and seated them in a studio audience. The host asked if anyone in the room owed their life to Nicholas Winton. Every person in the audience stood up.
He saved 669 children and kept it in a box in the attic. Some people do not do good for the record.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."