War hero and the "British Schindler"

Born: May 19, 1909;

Died: July 1, 2015.

Sir Nicholas Winton, who has died aged 106, was a war hero who became known as the British Schindler for saving hundreds of children from the Holocaust by sending them from Prague to London by train just before the Second World War.

In all, Sir Nicholas managed to bring 669 mostly Jewish children our of Czechoslovakia on eight trains to Britain through Germany in 1939 although the ninth train with 250 children never left Prague because the war broke out. None of the 250 children on board the last train was ever seen again.

Sir Nicholas had worked as a stockbroker before heading to Prague in 1938 to help with welfare work for Czech refugees and was 29 when he masterminded the rescue of the children. His achievements were often compared with those of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust and who was the subject of the 1993 film Schindler's List.

Sir Nicholas's wartime exploits, however, remained a secret for years until his wife Greta found a detailed scrapbook in their attic in 1988. He had not even told her of his role.

Sir Nicholas was self-depracating about his remarkable work. "You can't come up to somebody and say: 'by the way do you want to know what I did in '39?'" he said in 2009. "People don't talk about what they did in the war."

Born in Hampstead to German Jewish Parents, Nicholas Winton attended Stowe School and worked in banks in Germany and France before becoming a stockbroker in London. He was about to set off on a skiing holiday in 1938 when a friend urged him to change his plans and visit Prague and see for himself what was happening in the wake of the Nazis' invasion of the Sudetenland two months earlier.

Sir Nicholas could see that the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews in Prague but no one was organising any evacuations like the ones happening in Austria and Germany. Sir Nicholas met with some parents who were desperate to send their children abroad for safety and began compiling a list of names.

The first train left a few weeks later, on March 14 1939, the day before German troops invaded Czechoslovakia. While two other volunteers, Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner, organised the Prague end of the operation, Sir Nicholas returned to Britain and found adoptive homes for the children while also securing at least £50 per child to pay for their eventual return. On a few occasions, he forged the Home Office paperwork to ensure that the children were allowed into the UK.

After the war, Sir Nicholas worked for the United Nations organising items looted by the Nazis so they could be sold and the funds used to help people displaced by the war. However, his work in saving children in Czechoslovakia would never have been publically marked had a family friend not passed a notebook Sir Nicholas kept to a newspaper. The BBC programme That's Life then took up the story in 1988 and reunited Sir Nicholas with some of the children he saved.

Over the years, Sir Nicholas's work had been recognised with various awards. He was commended by the US House of Representatives which said it "urges men and women everywhere to recognise in Winton's remarkable humanitarian effort the difference that one devoted, principled individual can make in changing and improving the lives of others."

Last year, after being awarded the Order Of The White Lion by Czech president Milos Zeman at a ceremony in Prague, Sir Nicholas thanked the British people for welcoming the children.

"I thank the British people for making room for them, to accept them, and of course the enormous help given by so many of the Czechs who at that time were doing what they could to fight the Germans and to try and get the children out," Sir Nicholas said."In that respect, I was of some help and this is the result."

He was knighted in 2003 and received a Hero of the Holocaust medal at Downing Street in 2010.

Speaking last year, he said he was well aware of the urgency of the situation in 1939. "I knew better than most, and certainly better than the politicians, what was going on in Germany. We had staying with us people who were refugees from Germany at that time. Some who knew they were in danger of their lives", he said.

In announcing his death, the Rotary Club of Maidenhead, of which Sir Nicholas was a former president, quoted from a 1939 letter in which he wrote: "There is a difference between passive goodness and active goodness, which is, in my opinion, the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering.

"It entails going out, finding and helping those in suffering and danger and not merely in leading an exemplary life in a purely passive way of doing no wrong."

He devoted much of his later life to working for charity and his story was told in a biography If It's Not Impossible written by his daughter Barbara. He is survived by her and two grandchildren.