WATCHING A vintage steam train full of waving passengers pull out of Prague station yesterday, the Meisl brothers recalled other journeys that had changed their lives forever.
Peter was evacuated from Czechoslovakia by British stockbroker Nicholas Winton on the eve of the second World War along with another 668 children, 22 whom were on board the commemorative train as it left Prague in a cloud of steam to begin its four-day journey to London.
Czechoslovakia’s Nazi occupiers declared Peter’s brother Jiri too old for evacuation and, as Peter lived out the war quietly in Wales, Jiri and their parents were forced on to a prison train and sent to Auschwitz. Their father, like the relatives of scores of “Winton’s Children”, perished there.
The Meisls’ bitter-sweet story mingled with dozens of extraordinary tales in Prague, as the now elderly men and women who owe their lives to Winton hailed his compassion and determination, celebrated their survival and mourned for those that he could not save.
In December 1938, the 29-year-old Winton was packing for a skiing holiday in Switzerland when his would-be holiday companion told him to come urgently to Czechoslovakia instead. Adolf Hitler’s forces had occupied the country’s Sudetenland region two months earlier, and Winton was appalled to see the conditions in which refugees were living.
Winton immediately started raising money and organising trains to evacuate the children, and on his return to Britain began finding homes and organising visas for them, all while holding down his regular job in the City.
Word of Winton’s audacious plan quickly spread throughout Prague and, when he returned to the city and set up office in his hotel room on Wenceslas Square, long queues soon formed outside of parents who would plead with him to take their children to Britain.
“Those parents were desperate – it was heartbreaking to listen to their stories,” Winton recalled in a 2007 interview. “‘They knew all too well what their fate was likely to be. Their first thought was for the little ones. Never themselves. Practically all those parents perished in the camps.”
Between March and August 1939, eight Winton trains carried 669 children – most of them Jewish – to safety in Britain.
Seventy years on, as the steam train whistled its impending departure, they recalled parents telling them that they were just going on a short holiday, the excitement of the older children and the bewilderment of the younger ones, and strange first impressions of Britain: being sick crossing the English Channel, spitting out a first sip of milky tea, and wondering at white sliced bread.
“Our parents put a brave face on things, and, of course, they didn’t know that they wouldn’t see their children again,” said Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, who was sent to a family in Lancashire and still lives in Preston.
“It is very unreal and very emotional to be here today. It’s like a film set,” she said, as the train belched steam and Czech government ministers prepared to unveil a statue to Winton.
The evacuees also remembered how a ninth train had been due to leave Prague on September 1st, 1939 and how, after war broke out with Germany’s invasion of Poland, Nazi troops stopped it leaving the city. Most of the 250 children on board were never seen again.
“My brother was supposed to be on that train. He and my parents were all killed,” said Eve Leadbeater, who lives in Nottingham, the city where she was taken in by a teacher at the age of eight.
“Being in Prague on this anniversary brings a whole mix of emotions. Sadness at what happened and joy at being alive. What Nicholas Winton did was a great example of what one man with compassion and determination can do.”
The scale of Winton’s achievements is almost matched by his reticence to discuss them.
Most of “Winton’s Children” had no idea who he was until relatively recently, given that he did not even tell his wife about his exploits until the late 1980s, when she found a scrapbook full of clippings in the attic of their home in Maidenhead.
Before long, Winton’s story was featured on British television and he was being dubbed “Britain’s Oskar Schindler”. He was knighted in 2003 and, four years later, the Czech Republic gave him its highest honour and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now 100 years old, Winton intends to be at the station on Saturday when the train arrives in London. None of his “children” doubt that he will be there, or that he will be as reluctant as ever to accept praise or linger for long in the public eye.
“What will I say when I see Nicholas?” said Eve Leadbeater as she boarded the train. “I will say ‘thank you’. What else is there to say?”