Breitbart.com posted an article today about Nicholas Winton, now 100 years old, who oganized the rail "kindertransports" that carried hundreds of mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to safety in 1939. A vintage train arrived in London on Friday carrying Holocaust survivors celebrating the 70th anniversary of their trip across Europe to safety. Mr. Winton was there to meet them. The steam train carried 170 people, including about two dozen survivors of the evacuations and members of their families, on a trip across Europe to remember their journey.
The article explains:
"In late 1938, Winton, a 29-year-old clerk at the London Stock Exchange, had traveled to what was then Czechoslovakia at the invitation of a friend working at the British Embassy.
"Alarmed by the influx of refugees from the Sudetenland region recently annexed by Germany, Winton immediately began organizing a way to get Jewish children out of the country. He feared, correctly, that Czechoslovakia soon would be invaded by the Nazis and Jewish residents would be sent to concentration camps.
"Winton persuaded British officials to accept the children, as long as foster homes could be found, and set about fundraising and organizing the trip. He arranged eight trains that carried 669 mostly Jewish children through Germany to Britain in the months before the outbreak of World War II.
"The youngsters were sent to foster homes in England, and a few to Sweden. None saw their parents again."
It's wonderful that these children were saved; it's truly sad that their parents and siblings could not have been saved also.
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