I owe Nicholas Winton my life – today I’ll be thinking of him

It was 2008 and my family and I were at the premiere of the film The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton. 

The documentary is about the young English stockbroker who, between March and August 1939, rescued 669 refugee children, mostly Jewish, whose families had fled persecution by Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia.

The director, Matej Minac, had previously spent a day interviewing my mother, Liesl Silverstone (née Fischmann), my brother Rob, and myself – because my mother was one of the 669 children Sir Nicholas Winton had saved.

She’d told him about her journey from Prague to London and her early months in the UK – and now, watching the film with my mum was incredibly moving, particularly the scenes where the children depart from the station, leaving their families behind.

After the screening was over, Nicholas Winton was introduced by journalist and presenter Esther Rantzen, to great acclaim.

As Nicholas stepped out on stage, I felt hugely indebted to him.

Rantzen then asked for all the Kindertransport people present to stand. Around 20 – including my mother – stood up, most of them now elderly, to a tremendous round of applause. 

The event was exactly like the 1988 program, That’s Life, where Winton met the children he saved during the Holocaust.

Rantzen then asked all the people who wouldn’t have been there without Winton to stand. Half of us in the audience got to our feet.

It was incredibly moving for me to share that experience with my mother, brother, children and grandchildren, who were all there with me.

I realised then that Nicholas Winton had saved us all. I wouldn’t be here had it not been for him. That image of half the room – including my family – standing is one I will never forget.

My mother, Liesl, was born in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, in 1927 to an upper-middle class Jewish family. Her father and grandfather had established a large glass factory in and around that town.

While her mother, Friedl, came from a rural Jewish background, my mum grew up in a very bourgeois lifestyle. It seems she had a happy childhood together with her brother Heinz.

When the Germans invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, my mother’s parents decided to move to Prague, where the kids were enrolled in a school and my grandfather retrained as a watchmaker following their relocation.

My grandparents had numerous appointments with embassies seeking visas, but any attempts to secure visas out of Czechoslovakia for the whole family were unsuccessful – and once war was declared, their focus shifted to surviving as a family unit.

This followed the complete annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, when Czech Jews were subject to growing restrictions on what they could do, with whom they could associate and where they could live.

Living conditions in Prague became increasingly bad – but, until their forced arrival at Terezin, a concentration camp 30 miles north of Prague, in 1942, my grandparents had no idea what awaited them.

For now, they just knew they had to get the children out if they possibly could – and this is how my grandparents came across Nicholas Winton.

I have no idea how they actually met him, but it was most likely through word of mouth via the Jewish community in Prague.

The Kindertransport scheme covered the evacuation of 10,000 child refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe to Britain. Nicholas’ focus was on saving Jewish children in Czechoslovakia. 

As I understand it, the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia required two related processes. Firstly, documentation from parents placing their children in the care of Nicholas Winton and his colleagues for safekeeping. Secondly, at the same time, Nicholas had to agree a £50 bond from a named friend or relative in the UK who would formally receive each arriving child.

Unfortunately, my uncle Heinz, at 16, was considered too old to be accepted on the Kindertransport, and my mother, who was 11 at the time, was the only one in the family who managed to get a visa and secure the required £50 sponsorship to the UK.

She was on the very last Kindertransport out of Prague in August 1939 to London Liverpool Street.

My mother shared with me her distinct memories of the final moments of her parents putting her on the train; her father gave her a mouth organ to cheer her up as they waved goodbye.

Her most vivid recollection was of her asking the question ‘Why me?’ – a question that remained with her for the rest of her life.

My mother didn’t remember much of the journey itself. As one of the older children, she was asked to look after the younger children under six. That gave her something to distract her from what was happening.

She was met by a second cousin of her mother at Liverpool Street station and spent her early weeks in London in their flat in West Hampstead. She attended schools in various rural locations as London was being heavily bombed. Later, around 1941, she was united with her aunt, who already lived in the UK, and they moved to Leeds.

Throughout the war, my mother continued to hope that she would be reunited with her parents and Czech family. She wrote to them regularly and received responses from them periodically until 1942, when they were transported initially to Terezin – and then Auschwitz.

And yet, my mother’s expectation of returning to Czechoslovakia, and her family, remained. She was unaware of the scale of what was happening to European Jewry during the war and clung to her hopes of being reunited with her family when the war ended.

Sure enough: In her scrapbook, my mother still has saved a very moving telegram she received from a Czech family friend in July 1945, informing her that my grandmother was still alive.

You can imagine what it was like for her to receive this telegram!

Within weeks, my mother travelled back to Prague for an emotional reunion.

Friedl, her mum – my grandmother – was the only survivor from their family. Mum remembers that early period as being very intense and a mixture of extreme sadness and happiness for both of them.

At the end of the war my mother signed up for a course in personal management at Leeds University.

My parents married in 1949 soon after they met socially in London. By then, my grandmother had arrived in London and the wedding was arranged to coincide with my grandmother’s arrival.

While it wasn’t a particularly happy marriage, my mother did find the ready-made family she craved following the loss of her own birth family, and which my dad was able to offer her.

Much later, in the 1990s, my mother began to feel a real affinity with the Kindertransport and her personal experience, which she shared in talks with primary school kids organised through the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR).

Meeting Nicholas Winton in 2008 was such a significant moment for my mother. She not only met the man who had saved her, but who had also met both her parents. It was a connection she had to her past. I too met him at the premiere and was able to briefly thank him for his work.

My mother had a full life in the UK. She spent most of her life here and was very proud to be British, the country that gave her refuge.

This is especially important for me on this 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport – because many among the current generation of asylum seekers do not have a similar experience of seeking asylum in the UK as my mother; nor are they treated as well as she was.

I doubt if my mother would have even gained entry to the UK in 2024.

I hope for better things from the new Labour government, including sorting out the policy and processing of refugees and asylum seekers.

Because of my personal family experience, speaking out about the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers in this country has a strong impact for me. That is why I became Chair of both René Cassin, the Jewish voice for human rights, and the refugee befriending charity HostNation, where I work towards achieving safe routes for refugees into the UK.

It is part of my DNA to help those in need, just like my mother received help back when she needed it. Refugees were welcomed to the UK then, and they should continue to be welcomed with compassion today.

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