One Life – Official Trailer - Warner Bros. UK & Ireland
Warner Bros. UK & Ireland
5,534,522 views
ONE LIFE tells the true story of Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton, a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued 669 predominantly Jewish children from the Nazis. Nicky visited Prague in December 1938 and found families who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, living in desperate conditions with little or no shelter and food, and under threat of Nazi invasion. He immediately realised it was a race against time. How many children could he and the team rescue before the borders closed?
Fifty years later, it’s 1988 and Nicky lives haunted by the fate of the children he wasn’t able to bring to safety in England; always blaming himself for not doing more. It’s not until a live BBC television show, ‘That’s Life’, surprises him by introducing him to some surviving children – now adults – that he finally begins to come to terms with the guilt and grief he had carried for five decades.
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You will be remembered as a hero.
One Life – Official Trailer - Warner Bros. UK & Ireland
Warner Bros. UK & Ireland
5,534,522 views
ONE LIFE tells the true story of Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton, a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued 669 predominantly Jewish children from the Nazis. Nicky visited Prague in December 1938 and found families who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, living in desperate conditions with little or no shelter and food, and under threat of Nazi invasion. He immediately realised it was a race against time. How many children could he and the team rescue before the borders closed?
Fifty years later, it’s 1988 and Nicky lives haunted by the fate of the children he wasn’t able to bring to safety in England; always blaming himself for not doing more. It’s not until a live BBC television show, ‘That’s Life’, surprises him by introducing him to some surviving children – now adults – that he finally begins to come to terms with the guilt and grief he had carried for five decades.
It was an incredible thing he did, & he hid it for almost 50 years, not even telling his family what he'd achieved. He was such a humble man. He saved 669 children, on 8 trains. It would have been more but the last train was scheduled to leave on 1 September 1939 & Germany invaded Poland on that day. Of the 250 kids on the last, cancelled train, only 2 survived the war, the Nazis killed the rest. Winton beat himself up every day for that failure.
When you look at the later careers of those he saved, some did incredible work benefitting humanity, such as Renata Laxova (paediatric geneticist, discoverer of Neu-Laxová syndrome, who was only 7-8 when she took part in the kindertransport, & fled Czechoslovakia for the 2nd time in 1968 when the USSR invaded, & again escaped to the UK), Leslie Baruch Brent(immunologist & co-discoverer of acquired immunological tolerance) & Joe Schlesinger (award-winning journalist & author).
Winton was initially a conscientious objector at the start of WW2, instead volunteering for the Red Cross. A year later, he joined the RAF as an aircraft man but rose through the ranks. After the war, he worked for the International Refugee Organization & later the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Even in his family life he was an exceptional man. The youngest of his 3 children, Robert, had Down Syndrome. At the time, kids with DS were put in children's homes & basically abandoned by their families who assumed the residential home would be better for them than continuing in the family home. We now know this is not true, but at the time it was considered best practice. Winton & his wife questioned this, arguing that their son would have a better life with his siblings & parents, so they kept Robert with them. They were devastated when he caught meningitis & died when he was 6. Winton's response was to found a local branch of a UK charity for people with learning disabilities, Mencap.
He received a number of awards throughout his life, especially when his work with the kindertransport became public knowledge. In chronological order:
1983 - he was made MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for setting up a group of homes for the elderly;
1998 - he was awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Fourth Class, by the Czech President Václav Havel;
2003 - he was knighted (Knight Bachelor) for services to humanity in the UK for his work with the kindertransport;
2003 - he received the Pride of Britain Award for Lifetime Achievement;
2008 - the Czech government named a school in Kunžak after him & he was awarded the Cross Merit of the Minister of Defence, Grade 1. They also nominated him for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. Czech astronomers Jana Tichá & Miloš Tichý named a minor planet after him, 19384 Winton;
2009 - a statue of him was unveiled on Platform 1 of the Praha hlavní nádraží railway station, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the last Kindertransport train;
2010 - he was named a British Hero of the Holocaust by the British Government;
2010 - a statue of Winton sitting reading a book was unveiled at Maidenhead railway station (the town he lived in). There were already memorials of him at London's Liverpool Street Station, where the kindertransport children had arrived in the UK;
2013 - he received the Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan (named after Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who had studied architecture in Michigan, & rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest during the closing months of WW2, before disappearing in 1945 after being detained by agents of the secret service of the USSR on suspicion of espionage. In 1947, Soviet authorities reported Wallenberg had died of a suspected myocardial infarction on 17 July 1947 while imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison);
2014 - the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation set up a literary competition in Winton's name. The contest is for essays by high school students about Winton's legacy;
2014 - he was awarded the Order of the White Lion (Class I) by Czech President Miloš Zeman. The Czech Defence Ministry sent a special plane to fly him to Prague. He also met some of the children he'd rescued. He was 105 years old, with the children themselves being in their 80s;
2015 - Winton was awarded the Freedom of the City of London;
2019 - his old school, Stowe, opened a new boys' day house, named Winton.
Winton was not a religious man, he'd lost at his religion during WW2, saying he couldn't reconcile religious people "praying for victory on both sides of the same war". He also said "I believe in ethics, & if everybody believed in ethics we'd have no problems at all. That's the only way out; forget the religious side."
Winton died peacefully in his sleep, aged 106, with his family around him, on the 76th anniversary of one of his train's departures. His motto in life was not to wait for others to do something but be the one to make the difference personally. Strong words from an honourable, decent man who certainly made a difference.