GREAT BRITAIN CELEBRATES THE LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN WHO DID EXTRAORDINARY ACTS OF MERCY- NICHOLAS WINTON

GREAT BRITAIN CELEBRATES THE LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN WHO DID EXTRAORDINARY ACTS OF MERCY- NICHOLAS WINTON

What was initially scheduled as a European ski vacation, resulted in a London banker's incredible humanitarian effort to rescue Jewish children from Czechoslovakia prior to WWII.  Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE (19 May 1909 – 1 July 2015) was a British banker and humanitarian who established an organization to rescue children at risk from Nazi Germany.  Winton supervised the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. Winton found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain.[1] This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for "children's transport").

His work went unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years, until 1988 when he was invited to the BBC television program That's Life!, where he was reunited with several of the children he had saved. The British press celebrated him and dubbed him the "British Schindler."[2] In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia".[3] On 28 October 2014, he was awarded the highest honor of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion (1st class), by Czech President Miloš Zeman. He died in 2015 at the age of 106.

In 2016, Great Britain Philatelic Bureau honored Winton with his portrait on a stamp issued in a set of six British humanitarians. Included in the humanitarians honored were social reformers, women's rights advocates, and activists combating world hunger.

Aug 25th 2020 Alex

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