A group of children saved by Sir Nicholas Winton from Nazi death camps has, some 70 years later, unveiled a monument in Prague's main train station to honor their parents. Winton, who died in 2015 at the age of 106, had arranged eight trains to carry 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia through Germany to Britain at the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain. In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia." In October 2014, he was awarded the highest honor of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion (1st class), by Czech President Milos Zeman. The Farewell Memorial is a replica of a 1939 train door with the hands of children on one side and those of parents on the other. Milena Grenfell-Baines, one of those saved, said Saturday the monument was a belated expression of thanks. Winton was a 29-year-old London stockbroker in December 1938 when a friend asked him to go to Prague to help in the refugee camps. He decided to do more after seeing that the children of those considered enemies of the Nazis, who had annexed part of western Czechoslovakia, were not being cared for. When Winton returned home, he set to work by taking letterhead from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, then typing underneath the words "Children's Section." He eventually wrung a promise from the British government to let the children enter the country, provided he had a foster home arranged for each one and upon payment of a guarantee of 50 pounds per child. Winton drew up lists of some 6,000 at-risk children and encouraged British families to take them in. He arranged trains from Prague to the Netherlands, then ferries to take the children across the North Sea. The children from Prague helped by Winton were among some 10,000 mostly Jewish children who made their way to Britain on what were known as Kindertransports (children's transports) just before and during the first years of the war. Many never saw their parents again.
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Children saved from Nazi camps unveil monument to parents
The Farewell Memorial is a replica of a 1939 train door with the hands of children on one side and those of parents on the other • Memorial set up by group of children saved by Sir Nicholas Winton as "a belated expression of thanks," one survivor says.