Her grandmother was rescued from the Holocaust by Nicholas Winton’s Kindertransport, which spirited 669 children – most of them Jewish – from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to safe harbor in Britain.
Possibly the most well-known example of these rescue operations involved individual British families agreeing to “host” children from Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic through a program known as Kindertransport. Through this program, organized by Sir Nicholas Winton, an estimated 10,000 refugee children, most of them Jewish, were housed in the United Kingdom during the war. These children were able to avoid ghettoization and camp experiences; in many cases, they were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust.
I first met Sir Nicholas Winton when he had reached the mere age of 87. He was curious to learn about the UK Holocaust Centre, which our family had opened in Nottinghamshire. Winton was intrigued to learn that a non-Jewish family established the center, which resonated with his own ethics, as a Holocaust rescuer who saved 669 Jewish children by organizing the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport.
