ADVERTISEMENTSir Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who saved 669 children from the Holocaust, has died at the age of 106.
Winton, dubbed “Britain’s Schindler”, passed away peacefully in his sleep in hospital, his family said on Wednesday, with his relatives by his side.
In 1938, the then 29-year-old visited Nazi-occupied Prague at the request of a close friend.
The Nazis had invaded Czechoslovakia earlier that year and Winton correctly feared that Jewish residents there would be sent to concentration camps.
So he decided to organise eight trains from Prague to evacuate the children to safety.
The children were brought to Britain and he helped them to find homes with willing foster parents.
But Winton chose to keep quiet about his heroics for more than five decades.
Even his wife Grete was unaware of Sir Nicholas’s exploits; she only found out when she uncovered a list of the evacuees in the attic of their home in 1988.
Winton featured in an emotional reunion with some of the ‘Kindertransport’ evacuees on the BBC show ‘That’s Life’ later that year.
He received a knighthood from the Queen in March 2003.