Man who helped evacuate more than 600 mostly Jewish children before second world war commemorated by Czech Post

As David Cameron comes under pressure to take more refugees, Czech Post is honouring Sir Nicholas Winton, the “British Schindler” who organised mass evacuations of children to save them from Nazi concentration camps, with a special stamp.

Winton, who died in July aged 106, arranged eight trains to carry more than 600 children, most of them Jewish, from what was then Czechoslovakia through Germany to Britain at the outbreak of the second world war in 1939.

The UK is also planning a stamp to commemorate Winton. His daughter Barbara called it a special tribute and “a lasting memento of his relationship with the Czech Republic”. Winton received the Czech Republic’s highest award, the Order of the White Lion, last year in Prague.

When he arrived in Prague in 1939, he was determined to help some of the children of the families, many of them Jewish, who had fled Germany, Austria and the German-speaking Sudetenland, which the Nazis had annexed.

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Winton and others took photographs of the children and collected other details before starting to organise their evacuation. The first group of 20 left in January 1939. Winton returned to London with a long list of children and, after his day’s work in the City, went back to Hampstead each evening to organise permits and travel warrants for them to leave Prague and come to England.

As the situation in Czechoslovakia grew more desperate following the German occupation of the entire country in March 1939, Winton, who was already fighting with bureaucrats to get the children out, took to forging Home Office entry permits.

That summer, eight rail transports were conducted. A ninth kindertransport, which was due to leave on 1 September 1939 with another 250 children, was cancelled by the Germans. Most of those who would have been on board were subsequently transported to concentration camps. Nevertheless, Winton and his colleagues saved at least 664 children, 561 of them Jewish, 52 Unitarian, 34 Catholic and 17 others.

More than 75 years later, the feat still inspires. Calling for Britain to accept more vulnerable refugees, Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative former foreign office minister, on Thursday cited the example of the kindertransport, in which the UK took in 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Europe.

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She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We have to be prepared to share the burden. This is not about having an open door policy, this is about having quite a specific responsive policy in the areas for example that we have expertise. Unaccompanied minors, women fleeing from sexual violence, for example territories held by Isis.”