Nicholas Winton

Nicholas Winton was born in Hampstead to parents of German-Jewish origin who had changed their name from Wertheim and had him baptised. He became a stockbroker, fenced for Britain, and held left-wing views that worried his friends in the City.

In December 1938, weeks after Germany had seized the Sudetenland, a friend working with refugees asked him to cancel his skiing trip and come to Prague instead. He found camps full of families who had fled the Nazis and were now trapped. Britain had just agreed to admit unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany and Austria, but nothing was being done for Czechoslovakia. Winton set up an office in his hotel dining room, took names and photographs, and went home to make it happen.

The work was paperwork. From his mother's flat he badgered the Home Office, found a foster family and a fifty-pound guarantee for every child, and, when the visas came too slowly, had some forged. Between March and August 1939 eight trains carried 669 children through Germany to Holland and on to Liverpool Street. A ninth, the largest, with 250 children aboard, was due to leave on 1 September. Germany invaded Poland that day and the train never left. Almost none of those children survived.

He served in the RAF, worked for refugee organisations after the war, and said nothing about Prague. In 1988 his wife found the scrapbook in the attic. The BBC programme That's Life sat him in a studio audience and asked anyone who owed him their life to stand; the rows around him rose. He was knighted in 2003 and died in 2015, aged 106.