A job well done

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...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1UF6Rv2