The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Giving thanks where thanks are due

November 22nd, 2008

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Giving thanks where thanks are due

Anonymous heroes helped thousands during World War II
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November 14th, 2007 issue

By John Jan Eden

I am not one of the “Winton children,” but I reached Britain at age 13, together with my sister, 16, May 15th, 1939. We did not know anybody in England and were not sponsored, but I spoke English. (Nicholas Winton saved 669 children in pre-World War II Prague. For more on the story, please see “Winton humbled by children’s gratitude,” Tempo, Oct. 24–30.)

We escaped by special arrangements that my mother had made with a Ms. Warriner, the representative of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, in Prague.

This committee was established by British citizens who opposed the Munich Agreement, and felt a debt to the anti-Nazi Sudetenlanders who had fled to Czechoslovakia. The lord mayor of London was the patron.

When, after the German occupation of Sudetenland at the end of 1938, Nicholas Winton changed his two-week Swiss skiing holiday to a personal investigation of the fate of Sudeten refugees in Czechoslovakia, it was Warriner in Prague whom Winton contacted and through whom he worked.

During this time, Winton saw that the majority of Sudeten children did not speak Czech and were languishing in refugee camps. Complex British visa requirements existed for families, but it was much easier to get children out of the country with the British Children’s Sponsorship Program.

Winton agreed with Warriner to set up a children’s section of the committee on his return to London to voluntarily try to find sponsors and obtain British visas.

Warriner wrote to the committee’s honorary secretary Jan. 20, 1939, to encourage her to support Winton.

The British Home office demanded that sponsors all guarantee to be responsible for a child until age 18 and also required a deposit of £50 for each child, to pay for a return trip to origin — that is, to Nazi-occupied Prague and potentially to a death camp.

This sum of money in 1939 was enough to buy a good secondhand car and equals about $5,000 (91,700 Kč) today. This enormous barrier was clearly not imposed by a junior clerk, but by bureaucrats at the highest levels of the Home Office, in a blatant effort to stop an influx of refugee children, mainly Jewish children. I am certain they had thousands of children’s lives on their hands.

Since the Sudeten children were assembled in Prague apartments rented by my mother and were fed and boarded by my mother and her helpers, and I was 12 and 13 years old, I clearly remember the details.

Now, let us talk about the recognition of Winton, which, against his wishes, has grown to adoration.

Unfortunately, the world loves a symbol. In Winton’s case, and against his will, his admirers are embellishing the story to the point that now even 32,000 Czech children and the Czech foreign affairs minister want him to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

I think Winton is an outstanding individual to have gone to Prague on his vacation in 1938, to have seen a need and had the compassion and drive to volunteer his time to help organize and match sponsors with the files supplied to him from Prague by Warriner, Bill Barazetti and Trevor Chadwick. They were paid employees of the Committee in Prague, whereas Winton worked voluntarily in his free time in London.

I think that Winton is completely misunderstood, however. I think what he is trying to tell us is how ridiculously easy it was to get the children to Britain, with the biggest obstacle being the criminal and cynical requirement of a £50 deposit for the return trip.

I think that he is telling us that, even with the deposit, 6,690 children, not just 669, could have easily been saved if a few more people had worked at drumming up sponsors.

If there had been no deposit requirement, at least 66,900 children would have been saved — and then some.

In giving Winton the adoration he does not want, we are pursuing the wrong message.

The message should be: “Look, world, how easy it was! Where are the criminals at the Home Office who designed a deposit to guarantee a voluntary return to death camps? Where were the kindred folks who today give honors, awards and sign petitions, when it took just evenings and weekends to help save those 669 children?”

As proof, look at the Refugee Children’s Movement that rescued almost 10,000 children from Germany and Austria in Operation Kindertransport between December 1938 and May 1940.

Compare this with the negligible 25 Jewish Sudetenland children who left Prague for London four months after the German occupation of Sudetenland. They were part of the Barbican Mission to the Jews, of London, which offered escape and safety as long as it was agreed that the children would convert to Christianity and be baptized on arrival in London.

The intense but small amateur efforts of Winton in his spare time, assisted by his mother and his secretary and by Warriner’s crew in Prague, produced 919 finalized matches, 669 of them accomplished. Of the rest, 250 left Prague’s Wilson station Sept 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, of whom 248 were murdered by the Germans in concentration camps and two survived in Israel.

I have been trying for years, unsuccessfully, to find out what happened to Warriner.

While my sister and I were cared for marvelously in England during the war, my parents back in Bohemia survived the Nazi terror because of the bravery of an impoverished peasant and his family, in Nechanice, near Plzeň, who hid them for more than three years, while daily risking their own lives.

This brings me to the very big subject of proper recognition of those who saved individuals from the Nazis during the war.

These were people who voluntarily risked their own lives, the lives of their families, possibly the lives of the whole village in order to save a life, sometimes of somebody who was a complete stranger.

Setting them up as a model for the world, and, particularly, for the younger generation under the old saying: “He who saves a life, saves humanity,” would extend beyond World War II, I am sure, to the more modern conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Darfur, etc.

In the Netherlands, there are 4,200 recorded saviors of Jews and in the Czech Republic there are records of 150.

I think there is an outstanding need and an unfinished job to be done, an intense mission required, to trace all the others who succeeded, as well as those whom the Nazis caught.

We owe honors and even statues to both the living and the murdered, unsung heroes, just as we have given honors and dedicated statues to the Unknown Soldier in other countries.

I am also certain that Nicholas Winton would much rather see those 32,000 children’s signatures, and a few hundred thousand more, proposing a Nobel Peace Prize to the heroes who risked their lives and the lives of those dear to them, in order to save a life.

— The author lives in Canada.

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