![]() ![]() John Fieldsend … ‘I’ve had a very good life in this country.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardianįrom spring 1939 until the start of the war, hundreds of children, most of them Jewish, left their parents to travel alone or with their siblings from Prague’s main train station to Liverpool Street station in London, crossing Germany and the Netherlands before taking a ferry from Hook of Holland. He chipped in to cover costs, dealt with the endless red tape and occasionally forged travel documents and bribed officials. Evacuation efforts were up and running in Germany and Austria, but not Czechoslovakia. ![]() The programme was set up by the British government in 1938, to allow unaccompanied Jewish children under 17 to stay in the UK with a foster family as long as they secured a £50 guarantee for their eventual return ticket. Winton formed the children’s section of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia with other volunteers and coordinated the country’s Kindertransport operation. His remarkable story has now been made into a film, One Life, with Johnny Flynn and Anthony Hopkins playing the younger and older versions of Winton. ![]() After seeing the awful conditions in the camps where they lived, he felt compelled to try to save the children from the threat of the Nazis. Winton, a stockbroker, went to Prague in 1938 to help refugees from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), an area that had just been annexed by Germany. Fieldsend, 92, a retired Anglican vicar who lives in London, was one of the children Winton rescued just before the second world war broke out. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |