Nicholas Winton honoured by Czechs for saving 669 children from Nazis

Sir Nicholas received the honour from Czech President Milos Zeman

A British man who saved 669 children, most of them Jews, from the Nazis has been awarded the Czech Republic's highest state honour.

Sir Nicholas Winton was 29 when he arranged trains to take the children out of occupied Czechoslovakia and for foster families to meet them in London. 'I'm delighted the children are here'

The 105-year-old was given the Order of the White Lion by the Czech president during a ceremony at Prague Castle. In a speech, he thanked the British people who gave the children homes. Continue...

He said: "I want to thank you all for this enormous expression of thanks for something which happened to me nearly 100 years ago - and a 100 years is a heck of a long time.

"I am delighted that so many of the children are still about and are here to thank me."

He went on: "I thank the British people for making room for them, to accept them, and of course the enormous help given by so many of the Czechs who were at that time doing what they could to fight the Germans and to try to get the children out."

The remarkable mission of the man dubbed the "British Schindler" only came to light in the late 1980s.

It began in 1938 after the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland, the name for areas of pre-war Czechoslovakia.

He visited refugee camps outside Prague and decided to help children secure British permits in the same way children from other countries had been rescued by "kindertransports".

At the time he was a stockbroker in London and being from a German Jewish family he said he was well aware of the urgency of the situation.

"I knew better than most, and certainly better than the politicians, what was going on in Germany. We had staying with us people who were refugees from Germany at that time. Some who knew they were in danger of their lives," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme ahead of his visit to Prague.

But he said he was not afraid to help: "There was no personal fear involved."

Sir Nicholas, who lives in Maidenhead, was born in May 1909. He did not tell anyone about his actions for 50 years, until his wife found a scrapbook.

He was knighted by the Queen in March 2003 and a year earlier was finally reunited with hundreds of the children he saved - including Labour peer Lord Dubs and film director Karel Reisz - at a gathering for 5,000 descendants of the "Winton children".

His efforts have been likened to the work of German businessman Oskar Schindler, whose saving of Jews was dramatised in the film Schindler's List.

When asked by the BBC what he made of today's world, Sir Nicholas responded: "I don't think we've ever learnt from the mistakes of the past...

"The world today is now in a more dangerous situation than it has ever been and so long as you've got weapons of mass destruction which can finish off any conflict nothing is safe any more."

Source: BBC