Sometimes real heroes are just ordinary people who do extra-ordinary things. One such ordinary hero was Nicholas Winton who, following the 1938 German annexation of the Sudetenland in what was Czechoslovakia, traveled to Prague to help deal with the ensuing refugee crisis that was overwhelming the city. Aided by a small and very brave band of fellow heroes, together they saved 669 – mostly Jewish – children from the Nazis. It was part of the much broader ‘Kindertransport’ programme across Western Europe which, in Britain alone, saved around 10,000 children – once again, mostly Jewish. But it couldn’t last. The rescue missions hit the buffers once war was declared in 1939. Tragically, many of the children who arrived on Britain’s shores were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust.
A quiet and humble soul, Nicholas Winton’s story remained untold for 50 years until in 1988 it was finally picked up by a national newspaper and the That’s Life TV show on the Beeb. And now the heroic tale is the subject of a remarkable film One Life, with Anthony Hopkins brilliantly playing Winton in his dotage and Helena Bonham Carter as his formidable mother in earlier years, who ran the show at the London end.
Along with others, we sat through the film in stunned silence and didn’t rise from our seats until after the final credits had rolled. Winton was later knighted for services to humanity and died in 2015 at the grand old age of 106.
Here’s the trailer followed by original 1988 footage from That’s Life.
For the recreation of the That’s Life scene, the audience in the film was made up of the descendants of ‘Nicky’s children’.
“Save a life, save the World,” Winton says in the film. As we left the cinema, I couldn’t help thinking that despite his amazing story of hope, history just carries on repeating itself over and over again.
