Saving the children from the Holocaust | 60 Minutes archive
Nicholas Winton was not yet 30 years old when he used a two-week vacation in 1938 to travel to Czechoslovakia to try and help as many people escape the Nazi occupation as possible.
"All I knew was that the people that I met couldn`t get out, and they were looking of ways of at least getting their children out," Winton told 60 Minutes.
For most of his life, Winton rarely spoke about his wartime contributions. In 2014, the centenarian told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon his story.
A British stockbroker by day, Winton created a small organization he staffed at night, feverishly working to find homes for children displaced by the war, many of them Jewish.
Over the spring and summer of 1939, Winton organized seven trains that transported children from Czechoslovakia through the heart of Nazi Germany to Holland, where they boarded a ferry to the English coast, and then a train to London.
Nicholas Winton saved 669 children.
An eighth train carrying 250 more children was scheduled to leave Prague on September 1, 1939, the day the war began. The train never left.
Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003. He died in 2015 at the age of 106.