I was saved from the Nazis by British Schindler Nicholas Winton, my life in UK has been amazing

fantastic to to meet you it's a real privilege to hear your story when did you first realize growing up that there was the presence of the Nazis in in Czechoslovakia the first of all I was 9 years old when I was put on that train prior to that we had been living in a small village um in near Moravia we didn't move to PR till 19 uh 20 37 my father had always been involved with politics but the main memory of me is he being involved with a man called Thomas man and Thomas man had been exiled from Germany and he suggested to the Village Council that they made him an honorary citizen so that he could get a check passport but it wasn't as simple as that he had to have the permission of the Czech president and he and the then local MP and I have to remember the name Mr kak went to Prague and he met with Benes the president who immediately agreed and sent my father to Switzerland to offer Thomas man check passports and this is in 1936 when clouds were already hovering um Jews were already being persecuted in Germany but the the Angels hadn't happened at that point uh and then in 1937 we moved to Prague 1939 came and on the 13th of March my father got a message that the Germans would be in Prague any day by that time they'd already occupy the sedan land but I as a child was never aware of it um and I I mean I know it's all happened but I can't even remember it and my sister at that point was three and my mother was a a Doctor by the way who was working in Prague and my father at that point was a an advertising manager for a medical Magazine anyway on the 13th he was told by two men that um the following day when the Germans ared he would be arrested that his list his name was on the guest uper list he was to leave and as far as I know he left that night and he was told to go to Berlin because he said nobody would look for him there and for Berlin he was to make his way back to make his way to England um back in 1939 in May my mother told us that we were going to go to England and then on the um 31st of uh August my mother and my grandfather took my sister and me to the railway station and at that point my grandfather gave me this autograph book and in the book he wrote a message um remember to stay faithful to the country you're leaving to your grandparents and to your parents who love you very much Prague the 31st of July 9:00 in the evening 1939 and he had the foresight to ask some of my aunts and uncles to also leave me messages because um in 1942 when they were all being gathered together to be sent to terine and various camps um my grandparents and most of my relations were deported uh not to terine there were hundreds of extermination camps in Poland which are hardly mentioned um because these places and I have the documents they were taken there and they last a month and they get immediately murdered these were literally killing camps so that's what happened to my aunts and uncles my two cousins who were the same ages as my sister and me so at that time they would have been 12 and 15 I think um so really my memory which I have very little is my diary is My Autograph book um and uh that's basically the story of how how I got onto the winon train when did you first hear about Nas winon and what he'd been doing well I came to England I'm going to answer it in rather roundabout way um picked up at Liverpool Street Station brought to Ashton underline um was sent away to a check Refugee boarding school married went to France worked as an opair married and 40 years later in 1988 standing in the kitchen the phone went this is Esther Ranson and my reply was I'm the Queen of England because I really thought it was a you know somebody was playing a joke I knew who she was I knew her programs um and that was the first I heard and she said and then she said uh what I said to her oh she said we'd like you to come down to um to London because we're going to bring this Mr Winton who organized the trains to the studio to surprise him and I was so taken back because I had honestly forgotten about my past um because at that time you know Holocaust wasn't spoken about we didn't really know about the camps I was married to an Englishman with children um and I said to her oh I've got five friends in London you can get in touch with because I had been during the war at school with some of the then children who had traveled on the train she said yes she said but we've got this list and we've picked out a few names so you know we like one of you we like you to come down and so I came to the studio and I was met by ver ging um who who was one of my school friends and I'd kept in touch with many of them all those years and uh Esther Ranson said now you're going to sit on the front row uh and when this gentleman comes in you are not to tell him who you are and of course it's now this very famous program that's life that everybody has seen and can still see where Nicholas winon walks in already in his 80s Mila is on Nicholas's list you see her there but she is now lady Mila grenal Baines and there she is milina I believe you still have the name tag you wore around your neck when you arrived as a little girl at Liverpool I wore this around my neck and this is the actual pass that we were given to come to England and I'm another of the children that you [Applause] saved and um is completely overwhelmed by by us by being told who we are and of course Barbara Winton who rich WR his life story writes in this book that uh when he tells his wife that he's been asked and asks her whether she'd like to come with him she says no she said it won't be very interesting I'll watch it on the tell you I'll see it far better than being in the studio uh and they had no idea what was waiting for them so she said that was the time when their lives were completely turned around by that particular evening uh virus sing who was sitting on his left had been searching for a long time to try and find out who had actually been responsible and discovered she'd only been living about 20 minutes away from him in the in a small town near Maiden head and so when that evening he didn't stay very long we were taken in a a green room given some glasses of wine but he left quite quickly after that because it was it was just too much not too much for him um I certainly remember remember that um and then the following week that's when Esther ransen uh who said some of you watching please get in touch she asked him back again and the famous story is those of you who traveled on the train stand up and you see most of the studio standing up I was I didn't go down the second time but um these programs have being put together so that you get the very fous famous uh you know picture where all the people standing up who and then he turns around and U um really can't can't believe it um later on um I have a another little film with him when we were staying we were at est's house and there was Vera gissing and Nikki and I talking about this and he said you know I now have a family of 5,000 because all these people who who came now have families and they have families and the other thing that happened from that first day every day he had a phone call a visitor a message an invitation uh eventually he was invited to go to France to New York to Israel and um um I say not unknown but and he didn't want it he he never you know it wasn't a secret people say that he'd kept it a secret he didn't he said his children said they knew what he' done but you never talked about it and it wasn't until this scrip book came to life and even then um he and his wife there were Barbara says in the book they didn't know what to do with it and somehow Elizabeth Maxwell got hold of it and Elizabeth Maxwell wrote to every address in the in those lists and she received about 200 answers out of the 669 because it turned out that so many of those children were young and had been adopted not just fostered but been adopted had grown up had forgotten did not want to remember had lost their parents um but 200 odd answered and this is why this is how it all started and um Vera who who'd been writing a book called the PO of childhood in which she's saying I'm looking for the man was able to write in the book you know I I I found him and um well The Story Goes On from there how impressed have you been with the movie One Life starring s Anthony Hopkins his performance as Nicholas Winton and what was was your involvement in it well my first sewing see my first sighting of the film was a private view with just the family um Nick Minon uh Barbara had suddenly died by then and his and the grandchildren and if I tell you that Nick said to me it's just like watching PA watching Anthony Hopkins um I had been lucky enough to be invited to the to one of the filming Parts because he Anthony H because wanted to see some of the material that I actually kept uh so I met him and ve very nice very nice man and he was incredible because it was like looking at Nikki uh he'd never met him he'd seen obviously seen films of him and photographs but he'd captured you know even even the the movement The Voice um there were one or two sentences in the film very pissy sentences which some of the audience sort of laughed at because they thought it was funny but that was absolutely Nicki he would have come out with that kind of remark um amazing um what I think because I knew the story um I found I think people who who've never heard of it who will see it for the first time will take it for what it is but in this story it shows just the children from the camps being saved in fact um n Nikki saved other children and we were we were not part of the um the family that had been thrown out of the um sedan land area a lot of the a lot of these people were from the sedan land because overnight when it was invaded they literally gave people 24 hours to pack up and leave their homes and that's where the refugees came in there were 200,000 of them sitting around Prague and there was no nowhere else to get out they couldn't go out Poland everything else was occupied and um they had heard about the Kinder transport from Germany but they didn't know what to do and they were desperate if they couldn't get out to get the children out what do you remember about getting on that train with your sister the journey the tension and saying goodbye uh to family truthfully I can't because I say my autographic book is my memory I know it happened I can't physically I mean I'm you know I'm 94 and this has happened 80 odd years ago and I did talk about this with a psychiatrist and he said it's not surprising that you cannot remember U I just know that it happened uh I know that my sister was very silent throughout the journey and it seems that she she also consulted you know sashas about this and she was told she was probably really very angry with her mother for sending her away and there is a photograph of her arriving in in U Liverpool Street Station wide eyed looking very uh probably well upset and when you were taken in in England how did your life change and evolve through through the years initially with the family who took you in and then beyond we were collected at uh Liverpool Street Station by a gentleman called Roland Ratcliffe and who with him we traveled on the train to Ashton underline which is just outside Manchester now we had come from a very modern apartment and the rat Cliffs lived in a Terrace House two up two down you know front room kitchen with a bath and the toilet in the yard and two and two bedrooms they had a 16-year-old daughter called Mary and because they didn't want to separate us they sent Mary to live with her grandmother so that they could keep the two of us together um I suppose I must have learned English quite quickly and very soon after that I have a photograph because we all went on a holiday to R in Wales I gather I had no problem with food as people used to complain about English food yes the one complaint I have I can tell you and we all had that because it's mentioned in a lot of memories is when we got to Holland and we put on this big ship to go to England and we're all given tea with milk and all of us none of us had ever had tea with milk and The Story Goes we all poured it out but I very quickly drank tea with milk milk um you know M Ratliff I mean I remember you remember food uh plum pie Yorkshire pudding with syrup um playing out in the street playing a game called kiit cam uh seeing my first pantomim goody two shoes seeing my first film and you wouldn't believe this this was this was a Gilbert and civan American film of um of um uh what his name name was Coco what the fam was the Japanese story um Gilbert and salivan I'll I'll I have to take your word for it oh my goodness um the Mardo and the Mardo the Mardo the Mardo that was the first memory I really have of of Ashton and we were we were very happy with the r Cliffs uh until 1940 February suddenly my mother walked in and uh again to us it was a wonderful surprise but we never asked any questions and all the years you know afterwards we went our parents never talked about this but my mother actually came by Norway um she had been given a message in Prague to go to the Norwegian Embassy this is February 1940 where a me and I have the documents since then a message had been sent to her she was given um an etiquette and a passport flown to Oslo and from Oslo flown to England now to fly into England in 1940 was very rare and two weeks later Oslo was occupied by Germans so I was one of the or we were one of the very few children that actually had Parents parents who who had escaped because most of the original Kinder transport children that had come in 19 in 1938 and most of the ones that I met never saw the parents again you you have said that you had family who did perish in the Holocaust but you've also been talking about the family who who made it to to England how looking back do you see your story is it one of of of Fortune oh absolutely uh you know now these last these last 10 12 years when and everything has been talked about so much um uh we realized how lucky we were and uh I had another cousin um in the Czech Republic who should have come on the same train uh she was 11 years old at the time and she was an amazingly gifted pianist she was an only child and she begged her parents not to send her so they didn't however in 1942 uh when the final solution was taking place she and her parents would take to terrazine um by now she was 14 and she had been told by her music teacher that she should go and study in Paris because she was really a brilliant pianist however in terine many chech uh musicians and composers were also impr present and uh she met two two of them there but then she was sent on to um aitz she survived aitz with her mother she was then sent on to bson she survived bson and she managed to get back to Prague the teacher said that her hands that she'd never play again however she was so determined she practiced and practiced and EV evidently any check watch in this film will know the name of zzan rova because she became one of the greatest topic called players and a survival of three concentration camps and she was my cousin so there are about four relations at the moment living in Prague who are descendants of my maternal uh grandparents family and back here whilst you took in the realities of what had happened in the Holocaust you made an an incredible life for yourself again I suppose it was it was Luck first of all well I was sent my parents didn't want me to forget my own language and the Czech government opened um a sort of grammar school um in Witcher it was called Hinton Hall and it was very very close to Chumley Park and the Czech Army when they came to England were were um in Chumley Park they were in in um intense would you say you know there and some of the teachers were in the sh Army and they came to to Hinton Hall which was a decrepit old manner house when I talk to children and tell them I was sent to boarding school and they sort of think H Refugee in a boarding school this was a place that was falling apart and there were about 80 of us but the teachers we were taught entirely in check they had to write their own um own instruction books but I was a very poor pupil I was only good at a few things I was very good at singing because eventually I want to be a singer I was very good at sport I was good at Art um I was Dreadful at mathematics and totally useless at Latin I really was a very poor puple um so that when the school ended in 1945 and uh some of those children went back home to find no one there I came back to to Preston where we had moved to from asand line My Mother by now uh was a doctor and she was allowed to now work in the local hospital my father was an accountant and I had to go to work and so I became a nursery nurse um and I was there for 3 years and I'd always like the sound of the French Lang language because I do remember during the war we used to listen to the radio a lot and uh deal I used to I remember hearing his voice say France Fran and so I decided to get a job in France in op so I put an advert in the Figo got a job in granov went to two French families stayed in France for two years learned French came back and very quickly um met A Man Called George grfa Baines who was an architect um married him and I suppose lived a um a normal well normal I had two children George had been divorced he had two daughters which I which I adopt took on and then I had two children of my own um but during my married life I had a very interesting life and of course you embraced one of England's most passionate institutions that are football and a certain Tom finny well I didn't Embrace football but I certainly embrac Tom because we knew Tom extremely well Tom was his firm was a plumbing firm and my husband's firm was the architect and in those early years they actually um you know worked together so we we knew Tom not as a footballer but but as a plumber um and he became a good friend and I have I have pictures of him home so you lived a Wonderful Life uh in England yes recent events I'm talking specifically about the Hamas Massacre of Israelis in southern Israel on October the 7th has seen a rise in anti-Semitism in England and across the world how upsetting has it been to see that development and how concerned are you about the world right now I'm really concerned for my children and my grandchildren um it I think it was a shock to all the world what had happened and I know the feeling today is running High started to say possibly against Israel and I think you know 80 years after the fall I don't think people realized what it is that the these people who they were that that had been murdered um it's really difficult to just to talk about it and I think none of us know what's going to happen in the future um but obviously being Jewish and although my family are I suppose not are we're very close to the situation um I live in I live in the north of England and I haven't personally yet experienced any anti semitism where I am but I know my friends have people living in Manchester people living in London and somehow I cannot believe that this can be happening in England uh because you know things like this don't happen in England I mean they didn't all those years ago you know when you think of mostly but um it's it's very hard to talk about it really every January we Mark the Holocaust with Holocaust Memorial Day how important is it for people like yourself to continue telling your story all over the world and in schools to to keep educating people about what happened so as to learn the lessons of the I have actually for the last 10 years as soon as soon as we discovered Nicholas and as soon as the story came to light I have been going to schools for for I know for at least 10 years and I know that for instance before covid I had visited 80 schools in one year and since then now uh demands again are coming up and it is most important and I've received some wonderful letters you know I also talk to women's institutes and I talk to you know adult adult groups and they asked me what do nine-year-olds you know what sort of reaction do nine-year-olds U give you and I have two letters that I carry with me that I read out to the adults one of them is from an 11-year-old little girl who writes to say that she had a that she has a brother of three and she helps her mom sometimes to look after him and she couldn't understand how I could look after my sister when I was 9 years old and that when she went on a week's camping holiday she was homesick and how homesick I must have been and I sometimes say to the children do you ever say I hate you to your parents which they put their hand up and they do and she said when you asked us if ever we say I hate you I cherish my parents a lot because I have parents to love and these are her actual words so what's your message then to anybody who might be watching this about how to conduct their lives how to maintain hope where hope appears lost what would you like to say to people well I suppose e ethics come into it and uh Nicholas used to say you've got to learn to compromise which today is going to be very difficult this was one of the one of his messages you know he said that marriage is something of a compromise I think the main thing is to to accept other people's religions um and to be to live as good a life as you can yourself um if that's the message I could I can give

Channel: The Sun

Views: 9,663

Keywords: The Sun, news, breaking news, winton, nicholas winton, holocaust, holocaust memorial, holocaust remembrance, winton children, nazi children, nazi, prague, WWII, holocaust day, holocaust memorial day

Id: HzBW1lFb2VM

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024