One Life is the biography of Nicky Winton, a self-described “ordinary” man who did an extraordinary thing: he organized the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The author, Barbara Winton, is his daughter.
The son of German Jewish immigrants, Nicky was a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker in London who’d graduated from an elite boarding school where he, with approval from his parents, was confirmed into the Christian faith. The family surname was Wertheim, but his mother, not wanting to go through another war with a German last name, asked her son to select a more Anglicized one. Nicky’s friend helped him pick “Winton” from a London phone book.
As war clouds gathered in 1938, Nicky, at the request of an old school friend, canceled a Christmas ski trip and went to Prague to observe conditions in the wake of the German annexation of Sudetenland. Distressed by what he saw, he pleaded with the British and US governments to assist the Czech refugees. When no help was forthcoming, he wrote to the press. “In Bohemia and Slovakia today there are thousands of children, some homeless and starving; if they are forced to remain where they are … a concentration camp awaits them.”
Though adults were forbidden to emigrate, children were exempted. Along with Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, two aid workers for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), Nicky plunged into making private arrangements to get the children to England. Though he was warned it was an almost impossible task, he believed that if “ it’s not impossible, there must be a way to do it.” This small group had to find foster parents in Britain and secure visas, health certificates, and fees for the children. Though they sensed war was imminent, they didn’t realize how short a time they had to evacuate the children.
The first transport left Prague on March 14th, 1939. The next day, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Most of the children were Jewish, and some families and rabbis were reluctant to send them off because there was no guarantee they would be placed in Jewish homes. Nicky was irate, asking if they preferred “a dead Jewish child to a converted one.”
Nicky met the children in London’s Liverpool Street Station to unite them with their British foster families. He did not see them again.
The last train was due to leave Prague on September 1st, 1939 with 250 children. That day, the Nazis invaded Poland and closed all borders. The train was canceled hours before its scheduled departure.
When the Kindertransport ended, Nicky volunteered with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in France, and helped refugees resettle. He took on another “impossible” task after the war: supervising the liquidation of goods that the Nazis confiscated from Jews in the death camps. His teams sorted through boxes of cash and jewelry (they recuperated a million wedding rings), as well as other nightmarish reminders of the war, like gold extracted from the teeth of those who perished in the gas chambers. The assets were used to support Holocaust survivors.
When Nicky returned to England, he could not reconcile the horror he had witnessed with the cold-hearted banking world. He left his job and devoted his energy to volunteering with organizations that provided services for disabled children and impoverished elders.
That the book was written by his daughter has its pros and cons. On the one hand, Winton knows intimate details about her father’s prewar life, postwar work, and family relations. For example, she explains how a number of factors — namely, his early friendships with British socialist intellectuals (including Aneurin Bevin, the father of the National Health Service), his admiration for the anti-fascists fighting the Spanish Civil War, and his witnessing the hunger marchers in Britain in the 1930s — “primed him for the task of rescuing children from Prague.”
However, the lengthy descriptions of his personal life — his honeymoon, volunteer efforts, and fencing and photography hobbies — are more of interest to his family than to a broader readership. In her introduction, Winton calls Nicky’s work with the Kindertransport “a short event in his life.” Winton writes that she wanted to show how her father could separate his emotions from his actions — a quality that helped him face the dire challenges of war, but that was not so beneficial to his family relations.
Winton first self-published her book in Britain in 2014, where it had a limited distribution (perhaps it was meant mainly for Nicky’s children and his rescued “children”). She died in 2022, unaware that an international publisher would give the book a much wider audience.
It is estimated that six thousand people are alive today because of the children Nicky rescued. He was fortunate to meet some of them again when the story of his Kindertransport was publicized in Britain five decades later. A television program arranged a surprise reunion. One of his “children,” Vera Gissing, described the overwhelming joy they all felt meeting him: “Nobody knew who had masterminded our rescue.”
Nicky Winton’s story is the subject of an acclaimed 2023 movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter. The film, which focuses on Nicky’s dramatic wartime efforts, brings out the tenacity, humor, and humility of this “practical man.” It is a fitting complement to Winton’s biography.
Nicky, who died at 106, received many honors, including knighthood from the same government that had spurned his urgent pleas to rescue the children when they most needed it. But perhaps the most important recognition he received is the knowledge that by saving one life, he saved the world entire.
Elaine Elinson is coauthor of the award-winning Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.
