WHEN the letters and the accolades came thudding through the door of his house in Maidenhead, and the film-makers came calling, Nicholas Winton always protested that he was no hero. Heroes faced danger; he never had. They put their lives on the line; he had just worked at home in Hampstead, after a day being a stockbroker in the City. They dodged bullets and the secret police; he wrote letters, made telephone calls, and composed lists. He liked lists.

The fact that he had rescued 669 children from Czechoslovakia just as the Nazis invaded did not, in his mind, constitute heroism. He hadn’t gone out there in 1938 with any burning urge to do good; just for a holiday, in fact. Nor had he gone looking for children to rescue. Instead they and their parents—if they had any, for many were orphaned or abandoned—had come to him, as soon as word got round that he might be able to help them leave Prague and get to the West. From 6am the knocks would come at the door of his room in the Europa Hotel, and he would open it to find some shivering, starving, desperate figure.

He need not have responded. Many would not have done: his colleagues in the City, for example, whose reaction to his stories from Prague was to say that gilts weren’t doing well, either. But when faced with a problem, his instinct was to solve it. So he made lists of the children, took their photographs, got them Home Office entry permits, found them foster families and organised their departure on trains, via the Netherlands, to Liverpool Street. After just three weeks in Prague, he went back to Britain and carried on the work from there.

The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia gave him almost no help, so he took sole charge himself. The Home Office was slow with entry permits, so he forged some. In search of foster-parents for the children he put their photos in Picture Post; in the hope of farther havens for them he wrote to governors and senators in America and even to President Roosevelt, to no avail. He could have rescued at least 2,000 more, he said later, if America had been willing to take any.

The crate of rings

A hero might have got involved in the stress and distress of individual cases. He avoided that by treating them like a commercial transaction: like the world he knew, in fact. A market was created, takers were sought and any likely bidder would do. Siblings were separated, if necessary. Jewish children—they were almost all Jewish—were often placed with Gentile families. Mr Winton, who had Jewish parents but was thoroughly agnostic, did not care. He just had to get the children out alive and fast. When they arrived, exhausted, at Liverpool Street he seldom greeted them himself, preferring to stay calmly at a distance. Only one event traumatised him: the disappearance of 250 children on the last transport of September 1st 1939, as war was declared. But this awful thing too he stowed at the back of his mind, realising that he had done all he could and his part was over. The scrapbook of lists, photographs and begging letters went up to the attic; he said nothing about it, and moved on.

He liked it that way. The silent background suited him very well. For 50 years he sat on the Czech story, not supposing anyone would want to know, until in 1988 the scrapbook came to light and, with it, a blaze of publicity, culminating in an evening on Esther Rantzen’s “That’s Life” TV show when the whole audience suddenly stood up round him, applauding him, and every one was a child he had saved. It was “absolutely awful”, he thought; and wept with long-suppressed joy.

He was still no hero, though, in his own book. He had had no itch to improve the world: indeed, not even much idea which job he was best suited for. At his father’s suggestion he had tried banking first, having left Stowe with nothing much to show for it. After the war he dabbled in business, but it didn’t take. In later years he worked for a mental-health charity and helped to set up homes for the elderly; and wondered why saving the Czech children was deemed more heroic than those things. He had simply done what needed doing at that time, in that place. Surely any decent person would have done the same?

Sometimes, though, heroism was simply that: stepping in to sort out a mess and quietly doing what was needed. The opportunity occurred again, after Prague. In post-war Germany he was tasked with sorting and selling the contents of hundreds of army crates. Some were full of china, others of candlesticks. Some held nothing but watches, cigarette cases or hundreds of gold wedding rings. All this had been taken from prisoners, mostly Jews, as they entered Nazi concentration camps and then approached the gas chambers.

Occasionally, as he worked, thoughts would disturb him. Once the alarm clocks in one crate started ringing, reminding him of the unwaking people they used to rouse out of sleep. But he also had a commercial job to do: to sort these precious objects, get the best price for them and transmit the money mostly to Jewish charities. Again he picked his orderly way through the chaos caused by human evil, the abandoned treasures and forsaken loves, turning them to whatever good was possible; and did not allow himself the luxury of either self-congratulation, or a tear.