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Kathianne
07-01-2015, 10:28 PM
has passed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/nicholas-winton-rescuer-of-children-during-the-holocaust-dies-at-106/2015/07/01/78abbe24-2001-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html


Nicholas Winton, rescuer of children during the Holocaust, dies at 106

By Emily Langer (http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/emily-langer)July 1 at 11:13 AM



“Who’s helping the children?”

That was the question that Nicholas Winton, a 29-year-old English stockbroker, asked when he found himself in Prague in 1938. As war loomed in Europe, humanitarian groups had initiated efforts to help Jews, political refugees and other groups endangered by Hitler’s advancing threat. But Mr. Winton found no such effort underway specifically for the children of Czechoslovakia.

Inspired by the Kindertransport, a rescue operation then in place for children in Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria, Mr. Winton set about a mission he called his “wartime gesture.” He was credited with saving, through his personal initiative, the lives of at least 669 boys and girls. For decades after the war, he kept his work secret.

By the time of his death July 1 at 106, Mr. Winton was internationally celebrated as a hero of the Holocaust. He often was described as a British Schindler, a reference to the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to rescue 1,200 Jews were dramatized in director Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.”

Mr. Winton appeared uncomfortable with the honors bestowed on him, which included a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, and remarked that the work accounted for “just nine months in a very long life.”

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