Sausages and Nazis
In the 1980s, we were terrified and there was nothing to do.
Outside brooded with the menace of nuclear armed Soviets, serial killers and pedophiles. Inside was a torrid world of Judas Priest records being played backwards, excitable haircuts and The A-Team.
The first of these, we were told, could be easily countered by Being Prepared. Being Prepared seemed to consist of hiding underneath the stairs behind a mattress, although what good this would do you in the face of a 65 megaton Soviet nuclear weapon wasn’t exactly clear. If family members died due to fallout and because a mattress isn’t much protection against 65 megatons of Soviet nuclear weapon, you had to roll them in an old carpet, which you’d somehow managed to bring with you behind your mattress in the 2 minutes you had to Be Prepared, and then wait for the authorities to come and pick the body up. These same authorities were, naturally, safely ensconced in underground bunkers from which they would not appear for the next 48 years.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Soviet families were equally as terrified of us dropping nuclear bombs on them, and with good cause because when it came to dropping nukes on people, we were the ones with form.
Serial killers and pedophiles in those days handily came in one package, normally in the form of an avuncular, if eccentric, TV personality whose job bought them into close proximity with their victims.
So if you avoided going on TV, you could avoid them. But you couldn’t avoid TV altogether because, as mentioned, there was nothing to do.
TV itself consisted of balding men in nylon kipper ties either telling you The News, presenting documentaries about farming, or telling you jokes about their mother-in-law. Each of those things was more depressing than the other, in that order.
Elsewhere on TV there were He-Man cartoons in which He-Man had discovered secret powers by holding aloft his sword one day and saying ‘BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL’, as if that came as something of a surprise to him, and there was The A-Team.
The A-Team was a Menace to Society because of the violence, despite the fact that it didn’t appear to contain any violence. Just a lot of shooting with nobody ever getting shot and strategically placed triangular bushes that served to flip cars onto their roof during the obligatory chase scene.
And then there was a TV show the like of which no longer exists. Seemingly taking up most of a single evening’s schedule, it contained dire warnings about exploding washing machines, comedy songs about the laws concerning trespass, penis shaped vegetables and a dog who said ‘sausages’.
The show was called That’s Life, a magazine style look at the exasperating, amusing, infuriating and sometimes inspiring things about daily life. It had a team of presenters who would narrate the articles being covered, sometimes playing it for laughs, sometimes with the furrowed eyebrows of people trying to look concerned about something they couldn’t give two shits for, and sometimes with the talents of West End musical lyricist Richard Stilgoe, who was a sort of 1980s, bearded, gentlemanly version of Tim Minchin. Richard Stilgoe looked exactly like my Dad. Or, more likely, Richard Stilgoe looked exactly like everyone’s Dad.
The main presenter of the show was the estimable Esther Rantzen, who was the sort of woman the 1980s was very good at producing in that she both terrified and excited a certain type of gentleman, who had been terrified and excited by women ever since Nanny, in the pre Eton years, used to pull down their shorts and tan their behinds for eating too many scrumpy apples from the cider orchard on the family estate.
The other 1980s woman who had the same effect on these men was Margaret Thatcher, although the main difference between them was that Esther genuinely seemed to care about other human beings and could display traits that politicians such as Thatcher could not, like basic human decency and empathy.
It managed to segue seamlessly between voxpop articles in which old ladies would be asked their opinion on taking snuff and campaigns to highlight the lack of organ donors to save the lives of utterly cute toddlers.
The old ladies, filmed on the street in glorious late 20th Century, under-saturated Gloom-o-Vision, in the freezing rain that made up the majority of that era’s weather, were universally dressed in brown velour, with a jaunty fascinator grimly pegged to an expensive, blue rinsed hairdo, doing its best to not yeet off down Oxford Street with the driving rain.
There were consumer articles on faulty kitchen appliances, funny items from local newspapers, people writing in to ask for help on planning issues, musical numbers, jokes, tears and stunts.
People would send in carrots shaped like rude things - not photographs, the actual carrot - and the audience would roll about laughing because humans have always found dicks funny
There were several talking dogs, some of whom steadfastly refused to say anything at all when confronted with a microphone because, well, they’re dogs. There was one who his owner insisted could say the word ‘sausages’. On displaying this skill, it became apparent that the dog wasn’t saying ‘sausages’, or anything at all, but simply going ‘grrrrarrrarr-rrrr’ like dogs do, and the owner was manipulating the dumb animal’s mouth up and down so that it came out with a noise that went something like ‘ross-arr-grress’. That was enough to have everyone in fits of mirth.
But then, one day in 1988, it ran a segment about somebody who needed some help in finding some long lost people. The show had done this before and managed to reunite long lost sisters across the globe, or brothers who hadn’t seen each other since birth but had turned out to be living streets apart for 60 years. They were always popular segments. A dedicated researcher in those pre-internet days could scour the records, find the people involved and then a happily reunite the parties, normally with a little subterfuge so they could capture the surprise of the meeting and Esther would wipe away a genuine tear and it would prove to be a moment that melted even the hardest of hearts.
But on this episode, they weren’t looking for one person, or even two.
They were looking for 669 people.
Those people had been children at the time of the Second World War and they were on a list. A list that was in the attic of a small, kindly looking, quiet man called Nicholas Winton who, of course, was also sitting in the audience, enjoying the free tickets he had been sent for the show, minding his own business.
And they had, of course, found some of those children and unbeknown to Nicholas, they were sitting next to him.
What followed was, and still is, one of the most remarkable moments in television history and what unfolded was the tale of who was, and remains, one of the most remarkable men in modern British history.
Nicholas George Wertheim was born in Hampstead, London on May 19th, 1909. He was the middle of three children born to German Jewish immigrants who changed their name to the more Anglicized ‘Winton’ and had their children baptized to fit in better in their new country. Immigration was to form the backbone of Nicholas’s long life.
He went to public school at Stowe, (public school in England, of course, meaning private school because England is just like that), which he left without any qualifications. Instead he began work at his local Midland Bank which lead him to work in Hamburg and then France where he qualified as a banker. Returning to London, he worked as a stockbroker and the London Stock Exchange where, despite sitting at the very heart of the capitalist system, he became an ardent socialist and friends of the great Marxist Aneurin Bevan, father of Britain’s greatest and most enduring Marxist legacy, the National Health Service.
It was a principle that he would stick to throughout his life. That society is a better one when its principal aims were the safekeeping and welfare of the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
Although he applied for, and received, status as a conscientious objector at the outbreak of WW2, he still volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver, serving in Normandy and being evacuated in that other incredible display of normal people coming to the rescue of those who needed it, the Dunkirk evacuations of 1940.
Later that year, he rescinded his status as a conscientious objector and enlisted in the RAF, gaining promotion to Flying Officer by the end of the war and, on resigning his commission in 1954, the honorary title of Flight Lieutenant.
Following the war, he worked for the International Refugee Organisation, later to become the UN High Commission on Refugees, tasked with dealing with the overwhelming refugee crisis the war had left.
From there, he worked for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in Paris where he met, fell in love with and married, Grete Gjelstrup, a Danish secretary. Grete and Nicholas remained married until her death in 1999.
They had three children, the youngest of whom, Robin, had Downs Syndrome and, despite the medical advice at the time, Nicholas and Grete insisted that Robin live with them until to their devastation, he died, aged 4, from complications bought on by meningitis. In Robin’s memory, Nicholas founded a support organization for children like him.
Nicholas ran once, unsuccessfully, for local office and then settled into a long, gentle, safe and mostly happy life, working in several different financial institutions.
He was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his work in helping to establish a charity that provided housing for the elderly, in 1983, but otherwise, nobody would have ever have heard of Nicholas Winton, or his story, had it not been for the chance discovery, by Grete, in the attic of the home he had built for his family on Surrey, in 1988, of a scrapbook he hadn’t seen for 50 years.
That scrapbook, the same one that Esther Rantzen was leafing through on the episode of That’s Life, contained the names, details and photographs of the 669 Jewish children that Nicholas Winton, and others, had saved from Nazi occupied Prague in the few desperate months before the invasion of Poland plunged Europe into its darkest hour.
He hadn’t talked about it, much. He briefly mentioned it during his unsuccessful election campaign and Grete knew he’d done something in Prague before the war, but to her, and his family, and to Nicholas himself, he was prouder of the work he had done with refugees after the war, both at the International Refugee Organisation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Neither of them even knew the book still existed.
Grete passed to book on to Elizabeth Maxwell, the Holocaust researcher and wife of the billionaire publishing magnate, fraudster and media mogul, Rupert Maxwell, himself born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, who fled his native Czechoslovakia after the Nazi invasion. His story then briefly appeared, buried away in a corner of one of the Maxwell’s newspapers, but it wasn’t until That’s Life that the incredible story of what Nicholas and his comrades did was fully known.
Just before Christmas 1938, Nicholas was getting ready for a skiing trip to Switzerland when he received a phone call from his friend Martin Blake, urging him to come to Prague instead.
Acutely aware of the fate of Jews across Europe at the hands of the Nazis via his own family connections, Nicholas flew straight to Prague and what he found was horrifying.
The city was struggling under the weight of refugees fleeing Nazi persecution across Europe, particularly from the Sudetenland which Hitler had recently annexed. Living in terrible conditions, starving and desperate, and with Winter approaching, their plight was perilous.
Blake, who was in Prague as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, called Winton to help him in getting welfare to the refugees and alongside others such as Trevor Chadwick, Marie Schmolka, Doreen Warriner and Beatrice Wellington, they worked to help the children of the Jewish families most at risk from the impending Nazi threat.
Later, Nicholas was always keen to point out that his role was lesser than that of his comrades, and their stories, too, are inspirational and incredible. He always maintained that they, not him, should be given all the credit. But this is his story, and theirs shall be told elsewhere.
The idea of the Committee was simple. To provide the means for unaccompanied Jewish children to come to Britain to stay with foster families on the condition that a surety of £50 was paid for their eventual return. Whilst the scheme was up and running in other countries such as Germany, in Prague there was nothing and conditions were horrific.
Nicholas and his colleagues immediately went into action. Covering costs themselves, cutting through red tape, even forging documents and bribing officials, they began to organize schemes to take the children to safety.
With Trevor and the others working primarily in Prague and Nicholas working at the other end, they organized train passage for hundreds of refugee children across Europe to London, working hard to get them through The Netherlands after the borders were closed following Kristallnacht.
Working with his mother, Nicholas organized families to take the children, raised money for their passage and tried to cajole reluctant governments into action. He wrote to Roosevelt, urging America to take children in, but aside from Sweden, only Britain, reluctantly, took any.
Increasingly desperate, Winton took out newspaper adverts, offering pictures of the children to anyone willing to help. Nicholas went to the homes of families personally to persuade them to take in desperate children from their terrible situation.
And in the face of government complacency and bureaucratic tardiness, he, just a normal, humble, everyday citizen, fought for the lives of children to whom he owed no allegiance other than a shared common humanity.
Nicholas Winton acted not because they were Jewish children, or people with whom he shared a political or cultural affinity. He acted because he cared and because nobody else was going to do it.
He could have done what he could and walked away with his morality and ethical integrity intact. But he didn’t. He could have, rightfully, said that he had done his bit and been proud of what he had done, but he didn’t rest there. He and his colleagues didn’t just do their bit. They did everyone’s bit.
Věra Diamantová was 10 years old when she boarded one of the trains organized by Nicholas in 1939. The kindertransport, as the trains became known, took her to Liverpool Street Station in London, with her sister. From there, they were split up and Vera sent north, to Liverpool itself, on another train to be met at the station by her foster family.
She recalled being met by the Rainfords, a poor Methodist family who lived in a modest home.
"They had very little money, but they had a heart as big as a house. They did everything they could to make me happy. I was very lucky."
Vera didn’t speak any English. A few days earlier, she had been loaded onto a train in a station in another country, surrounded by Nazi troops. She never saw her parents again. Her father died in the concentration camps, her mother from typhus.
Vera’s two cousins were on the ninth kindertransport, due to leave on September 1st, 1939. Carrying 250 children, it would have been the largest single evacuation that Nicholas and the team had organized. But that day, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. None of those children made it out. Of the 150,000 children left in the Jewish ghettos of Prague, fewer than 1% of them survived.
Vera described being met by the Rainfords:
“When my foster mother first saw me, I call her my little English mother because she is so small, tears were pouring down her face and she hugged me and she said some words I didn't understand, but now I know she said "You shall be loved." And she was right, loved I was.”
Vera was sitting in the studio audience that day in 1988. Next to Nicholas Winton. It was the first time they had met.
Esther went on to introduce more stories of what became known a the Winton Children and then, one by one, introduced them to the man who had saved their lives.
Nicholas, for his part, managed to be both moved to tears and slightly annoyed at suddenly being waylaid in such a fashion. He had never wanted the attention, nor did he ever really think he deserved it. Other people, he insisted, deserved it more.
He deserved it.
In the end, he and we, the audience, realized that not only was he sitting next to some of the children he had rescued, he was surrounded by them.
People who themselves had lived long lives, had families, grown up, and become the people that Nicholas had given them the chance to become.
Nicholas Winton’s lasting legacy, if anything, was not in the lives of the children that he saved, but in the futures he gave them.
Renata Laxova escaped on the kindertransport, returned to Czechoslovakia after the war and then escaped again after the Soviet invasion in 1968. She became professor of genetics at the Departments of Pediatrics and Medical Genetics at the university of Wisconsin. She discovered Neu-Laxová syndrome, a congenital abnormality in children.
Alfred Dubs, the Member of Parliament for Battersea, came to Britain on the kindertransport. Luckily for him, his parents were able to join him. Dubs only learned of Nicholas after the That’s Life show. He later campaigned for Nicholas to be honored.
The poet Gerda Mayer. The filmmaker Karel Reisz. Canadian journalist and author Joe Schlesinger.
Hundreds of others, who all lived lives just as fulfilling and important, who all started as lost children with a few belongings and an identity tag around their neck. Their parents put them on to trains and planes and sent them out into a unknown future, arranged at the behest of a small, kindly, bespectacled man who none of them knew.
Trains diverted across Germany to pick more children up. Reluctant border officials found themselves suddenly richer and waved the trains through. Papers were forged. Trains ran at night to avoid detection.
Nicholas Winton gave them futures.
They became doctors, lawyers, husbands, wives, parents, Spitfire pilots, scientists, but most of all, they became people. To Nicholas, they weren’t just children with numbers around their necks, they were human beings and he saved them because he had too.
And because nobody else would.
At a time when humanity sunk to its lowest ebb and the fate of other humans became incidental, irrelevant or undesirable, Nicholas showed the greatest trait that humans have.
Compassion.
It was a remarkable and moving thing to see this humble man surprised and slightly annoyed, surrounded by those he had saved. But what happened next was even more remarkable.
He was invited back a few weeks later, so that more of his story could be told. Nicholas didn’t really want to be the center of attention, but by now he understood that, as the last of his colleagues still alive, it was not just his praise to take and that by telling his story, he could tell theirs, too.
The second time he appeared on That’s Life, something even more amazing happened.
Again, he was surprised to find himself sitting next to the now grown up people he had helped to save. But after teasing him for some time, Esther asked if there was anyone else in the audience who owed their lives to Nicholas Winton and if so, could they please stand up.
Dozens of people stood up.
Nicholas turned in his seat to see row after row of people who, had it not been for his work, would not have survived.
He craned his neck trying to take in how many people there were. All because of him.
And then Esther asked if there was anyone in the audience who was there indirectly because of Nicholas Winton. The children or grand-children of those he had rescued. And if so, could they too, please stand up.
And everyone stood up.
At the end of the day, it’s easy to get swept up in the emotion of the TV show and what a kind, humble and unremarkable man this remarkable man was. It’s easy to build in our minds an ideal of who Nicholas Winton was, and it almost certainly isn’t the idea of who Nicholas Winton thought he was.
It’s easy to gloss over the actions of his colleagues, even though he was at pain to remind everyone of the small part he played in a wider machine. That, for example, Trevor Chadwick was the one who stayed in Prague and faced the Nazi menace daily, or of the remarkable characters that were people like Doreen Warriner. Some of those people wrote of their work and were given honors for what they did.
It’s possible to argue that, of them all, Nicholas had the easiest role. And it’s also possible to build a narrative in which the whole endeavor can be legitimately criticized. Why wasn’t more done to rescue whole families? Why were families torn apart so jaggedly? Why wasn’t the Jewish identity and upbringing of the children given more guarantees? Some of them were placed with Christian missions who attempted to convert them, until Anglican ministers stepped in to ensure they could retain their faith.
Nicholas himself became disillusioned with religion, questioning how minsters from the same faith could be praying for victory on different sides. Ethics, not religion, he said, should be the guiding light for humanity.
It’s even possible to build a narrative in which Nicholas was the archetypal White Saint, rescuing minorities who were incapable of rescuing themselves.
But all that would be to miss the wider point of who Nicholas was and, more importantly, what he represented.
In his later years, Nicholas was feted as a hero. It’s not a coat he wore lightly. He remained humble and surprised that anyone would be interested in him. He even became a little annoyed by all the fuss, suggesting that nobody else could possibly be interested any longer.
But he knew that by receiving the plaudits and honors, that he was also honoring the memory of those he had worked with and that he continued to insist deserved it more than he did.
In 2003, he was knighted for his services to humanity. In 2010, he was named a British Hero of The Holocaust for his work.
In 1998, Czech President Václav Havel awarded him the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, for ‘individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the development of democracy, humanity and human rights’.
In 2008, they awarded him the Cross of Merit of the Minister of Defence of the Czech Republic.
And in 2014, aged105, he was flown to Prague on a specially chartered Czech Air Force plane to receive the country’s highest honor, The Order of the White Lion (Class 1).
In 2008 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A statue dedicated to him stands on the platform of Prague Central Station where, decades before, the children he saved had departed into the unknown.
He was awarded the Wallenberg Medal, given to outstanding humanitarians for their actions on behalf of the defenseless and oppressed.
He never received the honor of being named ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, as had Oskar Schindler, by the State of Israel, because that honor is reserved for non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust and despite being an atheist, Nicholas had been born into a Jewish family.
Planets have been named after him. A house at Stowe, his old school, is named after him. Trains, schools, statues, literary competitions, you name it and they have honored him with it.
When Sir Nicholas died, aged 106, on July 1st 2015, 76 years to day after a train carrying 241 children left Prague, his ashes were laid to rest alongside those of Grete and Robin.
And that point, we should all have been able to shed a tear, say thank you for the life of an incredible human being and console ourselves with the knowledge that not only had he made a difference then, he had taught us something about ourselves and what it meant to be a decent human being.
Some of us remember the lessons people like Sir Nicholas taught us. Others, increasingly so in the years since his death, seem to have forgotten.
We live now in a time in which, since World War II, there have never been so many desperate, terrified, and at risk displaced people on the move around the world.
People are fleeing wars across continents, their homes and lives shattered. They are poor, rich, educated, uneducated, brown, white, Muslim, Jew, Christian. Families, children, parents, grandparents.
They are people.
Increasingly they are seen as a menace.
They aren’t met at stations by little English mothers who hug them and tell them they will be loved. They are sneered at, beaten, driven back into the sea. They drown. They freeze to death. They suffocate in the back of trucks.
Ex Presidents call them ‘vermin’. British Home Secretaries call them ‘swarms’. It’s language alarmingly close to that used to refer to the children that Sir Nicholas Winton once saved.
We hold up the ideal of Sir Nicholas as the best of British. As the greatest and most valued among us and yet we do almost nothing to try and live by the virtues he encapsulated.
Instead we gather outside centres where the refugees are held and scream abuse at them, egged on by politicians and public figures who serve no other interest than their own.
We demand that these people be thrown back into the sea or we try to wring our hands and say ‘If only they would come here legally!’ unaware that they don’t come here legally for one simple reason. They have no way to come here legally. There isn’t one. Palestinians don’t have British visa schemes. Palestinians don’t have hospitals.
There’s no scheme to adopt a refugee child for fifty pounds.
There’s no love for them at stations.
There’s only hatred, indifference and political gamesmanship.
Their lives mean little to us. And cruelly, their futures mean absolutely nothing.
For every life that ends up drowned on a British beach, or floating in the Rio Grande, that ends up as small footnote in the paper and some angry letters from people who have learned nothing from history; numbers on a page of casualties, there is an audience full of people who will never stand up.
Not just one life lost. Thousands of futures lost.
In 2023, the then Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, visited an immigration reception center in Kent that had been set aside for refugee children. Some of those children, like the Winton Children, arrived in this country alone and with nothing.
On the walls of the reception centre, he noticed that the staff had painted murals of famous cartoon characters to brighten the place up a bit. Baloo from the Jungle Book. Mickey Mouse. Tom and Jerry.
Jenrick ordered that the murals be painted over because they made the place too welcoming.
He later tried to backtrack and mealy-mouth his way around it. But regardless, he did it because he saw a world in which someone was trying to do something tiny to make the lives of society’s most wretched children a little better and he didn’t like that idea.
He didn’t want to help the poor, the dispossessed or the desperate. He wanted to make their lives worse.
A British government minister, in the land that is so proud to have Sir Nicholas Winton as one of its national heroes, now reduced to being a bastard to children because he thinks it will make him more popular.
Jenrick later resigned as Immigration Minister over the government’s staggering plan to send asylum seekers on planes to reception centres in Rwanda, despite that country being on a list of countries from which people are able to claim asylum because of their terrible human rights record. A plan that will see at most 300 people deported at a bewildering cost of 2 million pounds a head.
Because they think it will make them more popular amongst a demographic of people, a minority it must be said, who elsewhere would call Sir Nicholas a saint.
Jenrick didn’t resign because it was a terrible idea. He resigned because he thought it didn’t go far enough.
There are still people like Sir Nicholas out there. Working among people who, ironically, are now the declared enemies of the survivors of the Prague ghettos.
They are people that one side label terrorists for helping children being massacred for reasons they could never understand. They are people who rescue sinking boats. They are people who put themselves in the frontline of the race to help humanity.
They are people Sir Nicholas would be proud of.
Instead of fêting them, they are called terrorists, do-gooders, traitors and ‘woke’. But now, more than at any point in history since Sir Nicholas and his colleagues raced to Prague to save children from death, do we need them.
The world needs fewer Robert Jenricks, fewer Donald Trumps and more Sir Nicholas Wintons.
Sir Nicholas was fond of reminding everyone of the old Hegel quote:
The only thing mankind has ever learned from history is that mankind has never learned from history.
And it seems like that may never change.