Nicholas Winton was a British stockbroker of Jewish origins who, in December 1938, devised a plan to rescue Jewish children in Prague and bring them to England. He died earlier this week at the age of one-hundred-six:
Nicholas Winton rescued 669 children destined for Nazi concentration camps from Czechoslovakia as the outbreak of World War II loomed. His death . . . came on the same day 76 years ago when the train carrying the largest number of children—241—departed from Prague.
The reluctant hero worked to find British families willing to put up £50 to look after the boys and girls in their homes. His efforts were not publicly known for almost 50 years. More than 370 of the children he saved have never been traced and do not know the full story. . . .
The humanitarian goals of Winton, who was born in the Hampstead district of north London in May 1909, were helped by a 1938 Act of Parliament that permitted the entry to the UK of refugee children under the age of seventeen, as long as money was deposited to pay for their eventual return home.
He set up an office in a hotel in Prague where he was quickly besieged by families desperate to get their children out before Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. . . . Winton . . . worked with relief organizations to set up the Czech Kindertransport, just one of a number of initiatives attempting to rescue Jewish children from Germany and the Nazi-occupied territories. He organized a total of eight trains from Prague, with some other forms of transport also set up from Vienna.
Read more on BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-30895961