NICHOLAS WINTON:  SAVE ONE LIFE, SAVE THE WORLD 

PRAGUE, THEN AND NOW

Prague is considered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. It’s the capital of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia.  Situated on the Vltava River, it’s known as the city of ‘the city of a hundred spires’, ‘The Golden City,’ and ‘The fairy-tale town.’     

Prague’s descriptive nicknames embody its beauty.  With ancient bridges, Baroque palaces, gothic cathedrals, cobblestone lanes, and the largest castle complex in the world, Prague is simply and stunningly beautiful.  But there’s a dark spot, a terrible stain, on this beautiful city. 

On the outskirts of Prague, is the Terezin Concentration Camp.  It was established by the Nazi SS during World War 2.  Tens of thousands of people died here.  Some were killed outright, others died from malnutrition and disease.  

More than 150,000 others, including tens of thousands of children, were held here for months and years, before being sent by rail transports to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland.

Even now, decades later, we’re all appalled at the evil of the Holocaust.  It seems hardly a year or two goes by without a new book, a new movie dealing with the Holocaust. It’s as if we are still trying to come to grips with it.

For instance, Rudolph Hoess had been the commandant at the most infamous of all the Nazi death camps.  He ran it!  After the war, when interviewed, he was asked how many people were murdered there under his watch.  And then, just like a businessman talking about how many bags of potato chips were sold in a certain time frame, he responded: “The exact number cannot be determined. But I estimate about 2.5 million Jews.”

How do you grasp such evil?  I don’t think we can.  And yet, at the same time, amid all the evil, we can find amazing stories of good.  That is, some people just can’t sit by and do nothing while something so bad unfolds around them. 

And one of these people was Sir Nicholas Winton, a British businessman who interrupted a ski vacation in order to take upon himself an incredible task. In today’s program, “Save One Life, Save the World,” we’re going to look at this amazing story and see what it can teach us about the reality of good and evil, and right and wrong.  Stay tuned for an incredible journey!

BERLIN AND THE HOLOCAUST

One of the most dynamic and cosmopolitan cities in Europe today is Berlin, Germany.  It’s the capital city of the German nation. It has six million residents and is growing rapidly.  

Of course, no visit to Berlin is complete without seeing the Brandenburg Gate. It had been built in the 1770s, and is the only surviving city gate from the old days in Berlin. It has been damaged in World War II, but today is a symbol of the great unification of Germany in the 1990s.

And near the Brandenburg Gate is, perhaps, the most emotional site in Berlin. It’s The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Yes, right in Berlin, in what had been the heart of the Nazi machine, is a memorial to the Holocaust. It consists of 2,711 concrete slabs, designed in a way to bring confusion and unease among those who walk through them, symbolic of the Holocaust, while at the same time giving the sensation of a graveyard.  Certainly, too, a fitting symbol for the genocide.

And there’s another site one should see in Berlin.  A house. The address is Grossen Wannsee 56-58, Berlin.  What’s so special about this house?  Well, it was right here, in 1942, that a group of Nazi leaders met, and over coffee and tea and cakes, planned out the Holocaust. 

To this day, new stories come out about the Holocaust.  It’s still hard to get our minds around such unrelenting evil.  Such unsparing cruelty.  And perpetrated so coldly and calculatedly.  What a powerful testament, I think, to the biblical doctrine of human sinfulness. 

Perhaps, too, what is so hard to grasp is that, for the Nazis, all you had to be was Jewish. That alone was a death sentence. Which meant that children, any age, were murdered as well. It’s been estimated that 1.5 million children, mostly Jewish children but others as well, had been killed by the Nazi regime. 1.5 million!  How do we comprehend this?  Do we even want to?

But you know, amid all the barbarity and cruelty, there are also some amazing stories of heroism, of kindness, of self-sacrifice.  And, yes, even in the inferno of the Holocaust, there were those who worked tirelessly to try and save people from what the Nazis had prepared for them.  

NICHOLAS WINTON

And one of them was an Englishman, Nicholas Winton. He is credited with saving the lives of 669 children, who otherwise could have been among those whom Hoess had murdered at Auschwitz.  No wonder Nicholas Winton has been called ‘The British Oscar Schindler.’  

Now, Oscar Schindler had been a German industrialist who saved many Jews during the Holocaust. His story became well-known after the award-winning movie by Steven Spielberg, called Schindler’s List.

For this story, though, we come to England, to Nicholas George Winton.  He was born here in Hampstead, London in 1909, to a German immigrant family.  His father was a bank manager, and young Winton himself went into banking. He worked in banks, not only in England but also in Germany and France.  

He eventually returned to England and became a stockbroker at the London Stock Exchange, near St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London.   

At this point, Nicholas George Winton was living a pretty good life.  In fact, in December 1938, when he was 29 years old, the young stockbroker was preparing for a two-week ski vacation in Switzerland.  He was looking forward to having a good time, just relaxing and  enjoying a holiday in the mountains.

LIFE TAKES A U- TURN

But then something happened, one of those moments when, all of a sudden, your life takes a radical turn.  When, instantly, everything changes.  For Nicholas Winton, this happened just before his ski vacation.  A friend had called him from Prague, Czechoslovakia. He said to Winton: “I have a most interesting assignment and I need your help.” He then added the following line, too: “And don’t bother bringing your skis.”

Winton, listening to his friend, left his skis at home and came to Prague. Yes, today Prague is a thriving and growing city, a great place to live and work and visit.  But in December 1938, things were different here. Very different!

Just a few months earlier, there was the ill-fated Munich Agreement between Germany and the West.  This left Nazi Germany free to take over a large part of western Czechoslovakia. Winton and others were convinced that this, though, was only the beginning.  They feared what was to become reality: a war in Europe with the Nazis taking over the whole country.

Meanwhile, news has already reached around the world about the infamous Kristallnacht, German for ‘Night of Broken Glass.’  It was a massive attack all around Germany on Jews and Jewish businesses.  And though there was a certain amount of outrage from the world, nothing happened.  Many argue that the lack of action against Germany for this attack on the Jews convinced Hitler that he could, indeed, exterminate them all.

No question, when Winton got to Prague, he was convinced that war was coming.  And his friend had asked him to come in order to help work with refugees, who were suffering in refugee camps in the country. These were people who had fled the Nazis in the West. And, yes, many of them were Jews – Jews who would face extermination if not given help.

Here is Nicholas, in his own words:

“I found out that the children of refugees and other groups of people who were enemies of Hitler weren’t being looked after. I decided to try to get permits to Britain for them. I found out that the conditions which were laid down for bringing in a child were chiefly that you had to have a family that was willing and able to look after the child, and £50, which was quite a large sum of money in those days.” 

“The situation was heart-breaking. Many of the refugees hadn’t the price of a meal. Some of the mothers tried desperately to get money to buy food for themselves and their children. The parents desperately wanted at least to get their children to safety when they couldn’t manage to get visas for the whole family.”

THE MAKING OF A HERO

This, indeed, was the situation that set Nicholas Winton on a course that made him a hero to so many. He decided that he had to try and do something to save at least these children from what would be certain death. 

It was here in Wenceslas Square, in the heart of Prague, that Winton began his work.  He set up a small office in this hotel. The hotel is today called the Grand Hotel Europa. The office was actually only a dining room table in his room. Yet many anxious parents came here, worried about the fate of their children, hoping that this man could save, if not their whole family, then at least their children.

At one point, hearing about a woman who was interested in taking Jewish children to Sweden, he and a female colleague met her for lunch in a restaurant. When Nicholas began to tell her about his plans, his colleague gave him a swift kick under the table. Why? She suspected, and it turned out correctly, that the woman was a spy working for the Germans.

But then Nicholas Winton ran into another problem.  Remember, he was supposed to be on a two-week holiday in Switzerland.  When the two weeks were close to running out, he wrote to his boss, asking for another week to set things up as best he could while still in Prague. His boss told him, no, he was needed back at the office.  Well, Winton took the week anyway, not sure what would happen when he returned home.

Before leaving after the extra week in Prague, he managed to get twenty children, ages 3 to 11 years old, on a flight to England. This was the first of the transports to England. One of the most well-known pictures of Nicholas Winton was when Winton, at the airport in Prague, was holding a small boy, Hansi Beck, about to be flown to safety.

Winton came back to England.  Fortunately, he didn’t get fired, and resumed his job at the Stock Exchange.  But, while maybe working there by day, in his spare time he worked tirelessly to get children transported out of Czechoslovakia. He had to find families that would take the children. And £50 for each child had to be paid to the government—the equivalent of about £2500 today. 

He quickly created his own organisation, ‘The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Children’s Section.’ The group consisted of himself, his mother, his secretary and a few volunteers. He worked non-stop, seeking to raise money and finding homes for each child. He knew that, once the war started, it would be next to impossible to get them out.

In some ways, perhaps, his biggest obstacle with the British bureaucracy, and all the red tape and required documents.

One time he went to the Home Office and urged them to hurry up with the entry visas. One clerk chided him, “What’s the rush, old boy? Nothing will happen in Europe.” Well, the war started just a few months later.  Frustrated, and committing a crime that could have gotten him a lengthy jail term, Nicholas Winton simply forged the documents needed to get those children out.

And so, from his start when he first got to Prague in late 1938, until August 1939, Nicholas Winton managed to get 669 children out of Czechoslovakia and into England.  Most, if not all, would have ended up in a concentration camp and been murdered, otherwise.

Many left on trains from the main train station in Prague – the same station that would later be used to transport other Jews to the gas chambers. 

By train, the children reached the English Channel. Then, by boat, they got to England, where by another train they rode to the Liverpool Street Station. There, they met their new parents and began a new life.

WAR AND HEARTBREAK

One of the most heart-breaking parts of this story began on September 1, 1939.  It was the day that the biggest transport of children was to take place.  Here, 250 children waited for the train to take them to England. 

But that day Hitler invaded Poland, World War II started, and the borders were all closed.  The train left the station that day, but with none of the children on board.

“Within hours of the announcement, the train disappeared. None of the 250 children aboard was seen again. We had 250 families waiting at Liverpool Street that day in vain. If the train had been a day earlier, it would have come through. Not a single one of those children was heard of again . . ..”

Every child on that train perished. They were among the more than 15,000 Czech children who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz and Treblinka.

And, well, that was that. Nicholas Winton eventually got married, moved to the town of Maidenhead near London, and raised his family.  His whole rescue effort just kind of vanished from memory.  His wife, who he had married just a few years after these events, didn’t even know about what he had done.

FORTY-FIVE YEARS LATER…

That is, until almost 45 years later.  In 1988, she found in the attic of their house a scrapbook. In it were the names of many of the children he had saved, the names of their parents, and the names and addresses of the people who took them in.  

She showed the book to the wife of media mogul, Robert Maxwell. Later that year, in 1988, during an episode of the BBC program, That’s Life, the story was broadcast. Then, with Nicholas Winton in the audience, the host of the program, Esther Rantzen, asked if anyone in the audience owed their life to Nicholas Winton.  “If so,” she said, “please stand!”  Dozens of people rose to their feet and applauded. His story soon became international news.

Over the years Nicholas Winton received numerous awards, by both the British and the Czech governments.  He was even knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 for his heroic work. 

Here, in the Central Prague station, is this memorial, established in 2009.  It says it all. It shows Winton compassionately caring for two young children as they prepare to leave their heart-broken families and catch the train to England.

MUSIC OR SUNSHINE?

Now, let’s think for a moment about what Nicholas Winton did. Yes, it was wonderful, wasn’t it?  He gave a lot of himself to help others who couldn’t help themselves.  That was very commendable.  We can all agree on that!  But let me ask you this simple question:  

Wouldn’t any one of us have done the same thing, or something similar, if put in the same situation?  That is, if you had the chance to rescue people from something as terrible as this, wouldn’t most of us want to do it, if we could? Of course! But why?

Well, let me explain what I’m getting at. You know, we live today in what has been deemed the postmodern era. It’s the idea that moral values are relative, subjective.

Indeed, there have been a lot of very smart people, intelligent philosophers and the like, who have made this claim. For them, morality is kind of like music.  It’s a purely human creation.  Jazz, rock, classical. It doesn’t matter. We, as humans, we alone create it.

But, others think that, no, this can’t be right.  Morality is, instead, like sunshine. It’s something that comes down upon us from above.

So, morality is either like music, or like sunshine?  Which is right?

Let’s go back to World War II.  And let’s imagine, just imagine, that the Germans had, in fact, won the war.  Imagine that they succeeded in defeating not only the Russians, the British, and the Americans, but eventually everyone else as well, and the Nazis reigned as the ruler of the entire world.

And, suppose, that under the genius propaganda of Nazi Minister Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis were able to persuade the whole world that anyone with one Jewish grandparent was, indeed, worthy of death.  

That is, it was a moral duty to make sure that these Jews, even the children, were killed. And, again, everyone believed that, yes, it was their moral duty to kill any Jew, any age, anywhere they found one.

Would it not, then, be the right thing, the moral thing, to do?  Well, how could it not be?  I mean, if morality were, as we said, like music, purely a human creation, and all human beings believed that the murder the Jews was the moral thing to do, then—well, how could it not be the moral thing to do?

Now, my guess is that the vast majority of people would not be comfortable with this conclusion.  But, I humbly ask, why not?  If morality was purely a human creation, purely like music, then how could whatever everyone says is moral, not be moral? 

Well, like many people, I think the reason that we are uncomfortable with that conclusion is that morality is not like music, is it?  No, it’s more like the sunshine. That is, there are some moral truths, some moral principles, that transcend human ideas, that are greater than our own views and opinions.   And among those principles is that you don’t kill men, women, and children – people – simply because of their race or their religion! Isn’t that right?

A MORAL ARGUMENT

In fact, some people use this as an argument for the existence of God.  If there are certain moral realities, certain moral truths, that transcend humanity, that come to us from above, where else could they come from, but God?  It is kind of a ‘higher morality’. This is called, even, ‘the moral argument for the existence of God.’

In the Bible, there is what many believe to be a written transcript of this ‘higher morality’. It’s called the Ten Commandments. And I believe that if people were to really read them and study them they would find an incredibly powerful and relevant tool for making life so much better now.

If people simply followed two of the commandments alone, against theft, and against murder, think about how much better our world would be right now?  And, add the other 8 commandments, and you’ve got the very best guide on how to live and be truly happy.

You know, life is kind of like a journey, isn’t it?  And along the way we have choices to make.  And sometimes it’s not always easy to know what choices to make, either, is it?  But I like the story of Nicholas Winton because he was a man, who when faced with a choice, chose to do what was right, simply because it was right.  

And I believe that the rightness of His acts was indeed, rooted in a ‘higher morality’-  a morality that came from above, like the sunshine. In fact, higher than the sunshine!  This is a morality that comes from God.  The God who revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, the God who is willing to accept you right now, even if, perchance, you have not always made the right decisions.  If, indeed, there’s really nothing heroic about you, at all.  So, if you’d like to experience God’s acceptance and His unconditional love, why not ask for it right now as we pray?

PRAYER AND SPECIAL OFFER

Dear Heavenly Father, we live in a tough world.  There’s lots of evil around us, and it’s not always easy to know how to react to it, or how to even avoid partaking of it, ourselves.  Help us to know what is right, and what is true, and even more importantly, help us know how to do what is right and what is true. May we always look up to You and Your Word for guidance.  In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Making decisions can be difficult.  It’s not always easy to know right from wrong.  And sometimes we wish we could get a bit of divine guidance, don’t we?  Well, I’d like to recommend the free gift we have for all our viewers today.  

It’s the popular booklet, Your Moral Compass: Right or Wrong?  You’ll find it most helpful in guiding you regarding how to make right moral choices.

So, please, don’t miss this wonderful opportunity to receive the gift we have for you today.  Here’s the information you need.  

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Be sure to join us again next week when we will share another of life’s journeys together. Until then, remember the ultimate destination of life’s journey:  “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth.  And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.  There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”