Today is July 4, a day we as Americans celebrate our independence
from England. Today is also Parshat Balak, in which we as Jews
recall how Balak, an evil tyrant wished to curse and do harm to our
people. So today is an important day for us, both as Americans and
Jews, as we remember the harms inflicted on us by despots.
However, another event occurred this week that makes us remember
not the harmful acts, but rather the unbelievably good acts that some
people do to make our world a better place.
I am speaking of Nicholas Winton who died this week at age 106.
Even though he became rather famous in his later years, I was
unfamiliar with him and his history.
I would now like to read excerpts from his NY Times obituary.
“Nicholas Winton was a London stockbroker in December 1938
when, on an impulse, he canceled a Swiss skiing vacation and flew to
Prague at the behest of a friend who was aiding refugees in the
Sudetenland, the western region of Czechoslovakia that had just
been annexed by Germany.
Mr. Winton found vast camps of refugees living in appalling
conditions. The pogroms of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,”
had recently struck Jewish shops, homes and synagogues in
Germany and Austria. War looked inevitable, and escape, especially
for children, seemed hopeless, given the restrictions against Jewish
immigration in the West.
Britain, however, was an exception. In late 1938, it began a program,
called Kindertransport, to admit unaccompanied Jewish children up to
age 17 if they had a host family, with the offer of a 50-pound warranty
for an eventual return ticket. The Refugee Children’s Movement in
Britain sent representatives to Germany and Austria, and 10,000
Jewish children were saved before the war began.
But there was no comparable mass-rescue effort in Czechoslovakia.
Mr. Winton created one. It involved dangers, bribes, forgery, secret
contacts with the Gestapo, railroad trains, an avalanche of paperwork
and a lot of money. Nazi agents started following him. In his Prague
hotel room, he met terrified parents desperate to get their children to
safety, although it meant surrendering them to strangers in a foreign
land.
As their numbers grew, a storefront office was opened. Long lines
attracted Gestapo attention. Perilous confrontations were resolved
with bribes. Eventually he registered more than 900 children,
although he had names and details on 5,000. In early 1939, he left
two friends, Trevor Chadwick and Bill Barazetti, in charge in Prague
and returned to London to find foster homes, raise money and
arrange transportation.
He and a few volunteers, including his mother, calling themselves the
British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, enlisted aid
from the Refugee Children’s Movement, had photos of the children
printed and appealed for funds and foster homes in newspaper ads
and church and synagogue bulletins.
Hundreds of families volunteered to take children, and money trickled
in from donors — not enough to cover all the costs, but Mr. Winton
made up the difference himself. He also appealed to the Home Office
for entry visas, but the response was slow and time was short. “This
was a few months before the war broke out,” he recalled. “So we
forged the Home Office entry permits.”
Mr. Winton sent more money, some for bribes and some to cover
expenses for children whose parents had been arrested and shot or
had fled into hiding, while many of the Czech families sold
possessions to pay for their children’s escape. The red tape and
paperwork seemed endless.
But on March 14, 1939, it all came together. Hours before Hitler
dismembered the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, the first
20 children left Prague on a train. Survivors told of searing scenes on
the station platform in the final moments before departure as children
sobbed and pleaded not to be sent away and parents faced giving up
their children.
Mr. Winton and his colleagues later arranged for eight more trains to
get the rest of the children out, crossing the Third Reich through
Nuremberg and Cologne to Holland, then across the North Sea by
boat to England, and on by British rail to the Liverpool Street Station
in London. There, he and the host families met the children. Each
refugee had a small bag and wore a name tag.
Nearly all the saved children were orphans by war’s end, their
parents killed at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt. After
the war, many remained in Britain, but others returned to
Czechoslovakia or emigrated to Israel, Australia or the United States.
The survivors, many now in their 70s and 80s, still call themselves
“Winton’s Children.”
But for 50 years he said nothing of the children’s rescue, not even to
his wife, Grete, a Dane he married in 1948. But after finding his long-
hidden scrapbook — crammed with names, pictures, letters from
families, travel documents and notes crediting his colleagues — his
wife asked for an explanation. He gave her a general idea, but said
he thought the papers had no value and suggested discarding them.
“You can’t throw those papers away,” she responded. “They are
children’s lives.”
Among them are the film director Karel Reisz, who made “The French
Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981) and “Isadora” (1968) Alfred Dubs, who
became a member of Parliament; Joe Schlesinger, a Canadian
broadcast correspondent; Hugo Marom, a founder of the Israeli Air
Force; Vera Gissing, the author of “Pearls of Childhood” (2007) and
other books; and Renata Laxová, a geneticist who discovered the
Neu-Laxová Syndrome, a congenital abnormality.
But he reluctantly agreed to let her explore the matter. She gave the
scrapbook to a Holocaust historian. A newspaper article followed.
Then a BBC television program featured the story of his rescues, and
the publicity went worldwide.
He was showered with honors: the Czech Republic’s highest award,
honorary citizenship of Prague, an American congressional
resolution, letters of appreciation from President George W. Bush,
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, former President Ezer Weizman
of Israel and people around the world, and a nomination by the Czech
Republic for the Nobel Peace Prize. His scrapbook went to Yad
Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. Streets and schools were
named for him. Statues went up in Prague and London.
He never really explained why he acted as he did, though he offered
a bare rationale in an interview with The New York Times in 2001:
“One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in
danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven,
and there was no organization to do that. Why did I do it? Why do
people do different things? Some people revel in taking risks, and
some go through life taking no risks at all.”
May we be thankful that our forefathers had the courage to rise up
against the British tyrants, and that our ancestors rose up against
Balak, Amalek and Pharaoh. And let us also remember the courage
of even just one man who rescued 700 Jewish children 76 years ago.
RAH
Shabbat Shalom.
No comments:
Post a Comment