Holocaust Memorial Day Preview: Leeds Keynote Speaker

National World - LocalTV

The son of the man dubbed ‘Britain’s Schindler’ will deliver the keynote speech at this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day civic event in Leeds, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Transcript

00:00My name is Nick Winton. I'm the son of St. Nicholas Winton, who's most well known for the

00:06rescue he made from children from Czechoslovakia before the war. He was visiting Prague through a

00:14series of circumstances and saw refugees, mostly German Jews, who were being driven out of Germany

00:22and trying to find somewhere safe to avoid the violence that came with Hitler's advance.

00:30And he saw them in camps in the middle of Central European winter, bitterly cold,

00:36with one organisation trying to help the adults, the dissidents. Often the parents were desperate

00:42if they couldn't get out to find a way of getting their children somewhere safe. So he put together

00:48a team, found out from the British government what conditions there were to bringing children

00:54to the UK, and there were some, they were quite onerous. So he started a project to try and find

01:02safety for children who parents were willing to send away. So there was a chain of actions, and

01:11he spent most of his time, when he got back to England, writing letters to try and encourage

01:18people to either donate or to become foster carers. And then when he got a foster family who

01:24said, I might take a, I don't know, five-year-old, he'd send them a stack of cards with pictures of

01:30five-year-olds and say, pick one. Then when the next train was organised, the child would be

01:35brought from Prague to London for the foster family to collect. He had his holiday in January 1939,

01:43and through the spring and summer, he organised eight trains, bringing 669 children

01:50to the UK. And today they're reckoned to be over 6,000 people alive

01:56because of those 669 people he saved.

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