A Hero For Their Time
There but for the conscience and energetic striving of one man would hundreds of Jewish children have perished like the millions of others, in Nazi Germany's death camps. This was not a righteous Gentile, whose humanity and generosity of spirit toward others has been evidenced by the desperate work of those dedicated to helping Jews destined for death, but rather a British Jew who understood the plight of Czechoslovakian Jews before the onset of World War Two.Sir Nicholas Winton, a modest man whose work in saving the lives of Jewish-Czech children was unknown even to those of his family closest to him until a half-century after he had acted to save those children, through the planning of his "Kinder-transport" has recently been honoured by some of those 669 children whose lives he saved. They are now, after all those years, elderly themselves, and some of their children and grandchildren turned out to honour this man.
Who is now an unbelievable hundred years of age, and counting. His work in chartering special trains, raising the necessary funding, searching for people to commit themselves as host families to these rescued children was unsparing in its frenetic need. He chartered eight trains, travelling through Germany in 1939, going through Prague toward Britain to Harwich and finally on to London, and that historic route was re-enacted last week, in commemoration of what had occurred 70 years earlier.
Sir Nicholas Winton still mourns the dread fact that the ninth train which was to have departed on September 3rd, was held up by the historical reality of the declaration of war that very day. The two hundred and fifty children on board that ninth train were never able to reach safety. In honour of the humanitarian effort Sir Winton roused himself to, he was awarded the freedom of the city of Prague, and decorated by President Vaclav Havel.
Not least, a small planet was named by Czech astronomers after him. Just coincidentally, another Jew, a most famous scientist by the name of Albert Einstein, was re-located from Zurich to Prague, in 1911. Professor Einstein's work in quantum mechanics and his Nobel-prize-winning General Theory of Relativity, won him a teaching post in Prague. Einstein's many published papers enormously assisted astronomers in their work, understanding the universe.
But even in 1911, several years before the outbreak of the First World War, relations between Germans and Czechs were badly strained, and already the virulence of German anti-Semitism was making itself felt. In fact, the Nazi creed with its racist theories was first evidenced in the Sudetenland and surfaced in Czechoslovakia before reaching popularity in Germany itself. Life for Czech-German Jews began to assume sinister proportions in Prague early on.
Yet the full scope of the tragedy only began to manifest itself horribly several decades later; enmity simmering below the surface until it came to the full boil of the 'Final Solution'. "It happened so many years ago yet I remember it so vividly. I never saw my parents again or my sister. My parents were shot and what they did with my sister I really don't want to know", said 81-year-old Otto Deutsch, saved from death at age 11.
Labels: Heroes and Villains, Holocaust, Human Relations
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, September 06, 2009
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