Havel Pays Tribute to British Man Who Saved the Lives of Czech Jews

Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel has personally thanked an elderly British man who during World War II saved the lives of 664 Czech children, most of them Jews, by arranging their escape to Britain.

The playwright-turned-president received 82-year-old Nicholas Winton of Maidenhead, England, at Hradcany Castle on May 30. He thanked Winton, who, as an official of the London Stock Exchange in 1939, provided fabricated documents and arranged the departure of four trainloads of children, all at a risk to his own security.

The children’s lives were in danger because of their Jewish origin or because of their parents’ anti-Nazi activities.

Winton, who is not Jewish, was instrumental in finding homes in Britain for all the children.

Winton was the guest of the Prague independent daily newspaper Lidove Noviny and the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech and Slovak Republics. He arrived May 24 and was greeted at the Prague airport by about 20 people who were in the lifesaving transport 52 years ago.

Speaking at a dinner given at the Prague Jewish Town Hall in Winton’s honor, Israeli Ambassador Yoel Sher compared Winton’s train-loads of endangered children to the Israeli aircraft that had just evacuated Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa.

Winton said he is still haunted by the nightmare of lists and photos of children whose departure in two more trains had been prepared for September 1939. Their journey to freedom was prevented by the outbreak of war. Most of them perished in the Nazi death camps during the war.

On the same day as he received Winton at Hradcany Castle, Havel also received French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of the film “Shoah,” which is now being screened in a Prague movie theater for the first time.