Sir Nicholas Winton

Nicholas Winton's statue at Prague rail station 

While doing research for a book I am writing, I came across the extraordinary story of Nicholas George Winton, an ordinary man who proved himself to be a true hero at an extremely dangerous time in history. I cannot but share it here. The Photograph is from Wikipedia and the information is from Wikipedia and a few other sources.

In 1939, just days before the Second World War began, Nicholas Winton risked his life to save 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for "child transportation"). He ensured their safe passage to Britain.  They would have been dead otherwise. And some of the children saved by Winton grew up to become mathematician, paediatric geneticist, film maker, parliamentarian, and so on. 

If Winton’s feat was incredible, what followed was even more so.

Like a true hero, he never publicised his efforts. Neither did he try to profit from it. Fifty years later, his wife found a scrapbook in their attic that contained the names, pictures, and documents of the children he had saved. 

And the world came to know his humongous exploits much later, through an episode of the BBC television programme That’s Life! in 1988. BBC invited Winton to the programme as a member of the audience. During the programme, the host of the programme, Esther Rantzen showed Winton's scrapbook and narrated his achievements. Then she asked if anybody in the audience owed their live to Winton, and if so, to stand up. More than two dozen people sitting around Winton and his wife rose and applauded.

Sir Nicholas was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 and received the highest Czech honour, the Order of the White Lion in 2014. He died on 1 July 2015, aged 106. 

Nicholas Winton was born on 19 May 1909 in Hampstead, London. His parents were German Jews who had relocated to London two years before. The family name was Wertheim, but they changed it to Winton in an effort at integration. They also converted to Christianity, and Winton was baptised. 

In 1923, Winton entered school, but left without qualifications. He attended night school while volunteering at the Midland Bank. He then moved to Hamburg, Berlin, and Paris, working for different banks. He also earned a banking qualification in France. Returning to London, he became a broker at the London Stock Exchange. 

Shortly before Christmas 1938, Winton was planning to travel to Switzerland for a skiing holiday. But he decided instead to visit Prague and help the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, then in the process of being occupied by Germany. 

Winton single-handedly established an organization to aid children from Jewish families at risk from the Nazis. He set up his office at a dining room table in his Prague hotel. 

In the night of 9-10 November 1938, paramilitary forces and German civilians killed Jews throughout Nazi Germany, while the German authorities looked on. The pogrom was known as the Night of Broken Glass. The name comes from shards of broken glass that littered the streets of German cities after windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

After the Night of the broken glass, the British Parliament allowed the entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a warranty of £50 was deposited for their eventual return to their own country. 

However, the Dutch government refused Jewish refugees to enter the Netherlands, and the children were to board a ferry from there. The Dutch border guards sent the refugees back to Germany, despite the horrors being well known. 

Winton was able to overcome the impediment thanks to guarantees he had obtained from Britain. After the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents would later perish in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Throughout the summer of 1939, he, with the help of his mother, placed photographs of the children in Picture Post seeking families to adopt them. He also wrote to US politicians such as Roosevelt, asking them to take in more children. 

Winton later said that two thousand more might have been saved if they had helped, but only Sweden accepted some refugee children, besides Britain. 

The last group of 250, scheduled to leave Prague on 1 September 1939, was unable to depart as Hitler invaded Poland on the same day, and the Second World War had begun. Of the children due to leave by that train, only two survived the war.

* 

Sadly, 2017 looks disturbingly like 1938. As I write this, millions of refugees are living in terrible camps unprotected from cold, rain, and snow. And borders are being sealed. People who could have had the same fate as the Syrian refugees if history had moved in a different direction, are trying their best to throw out starving children from their doors. 

The world needs lots of Nichlas George Wintons today.

Bengaluru / 05 Feb 2017

We can't afford to sit back

From global warming to terrorism, from intolerance to destruction of democratic institutions, from "alternative truth" to post-truth democracy, from millions of refugees to economic disparity rising everywhere. Plus despots in power from the US to Turkey to Israel to Russia to India to the Philippines (China has never had a taste of democracy) ... uneducated charlatans pretending to be world leaders and behaving like leaders of savage clans ...

If there was anyone out there who wished the world destroyed, 2017 would be heady time for them. Cheers!

But we, the ordinary people, the young and the not so young, the middle-aged and the elderly, children, parents, and grandparents, have a huge stake in this planet. We just cannot sit back and watch the slide towards a violent end.

If you think a course correction is essential, millions of people, mainly women, have shown us the way, in cities as diverse as Vancouver and Nairobi, Washington and Wellington, on 21 January 2017.

Stand up, protest!!!

Kolkata / 01 February 2017

Map - Courtesy the New York Times. Sadly there hasn't been a murmur of protest in India, the only dot on the subcontinent is Dhaka.

Friendship therapy

[I love writing about my experiences: my childhood, the wonderful friends who’ve filled my life with light and laughter, and of course, the exotic places I visit and the people I meet from time to time. However, of late, I have been deeply affected by what’s happening in my country and the world at large, and I can hardly write anything personal.

Maybe, it’s time to take a break. Let me turn back to life writing and share with you something shameful I did to a buddy as a child :(. And then I’ll move on to an exhilarating experience I had much later :).

Were the two events connected?]

Academically, Rahul was one of the best in our reasonably strong class. He always came at or near the top of the class. Like all budding Bengali intellectuals, he was thin, wore specs, and avoided contact sports like football or boxing. If that gives you the picture of a boring bespectacled bookworm, it’s because of my incompetence as a writer. Rahul was charming, ever smiling, had no airs about his considerable academic ability, and was loved by all. And he preferred the last bench, unlike most “good” students.

When we were in Class IX, Rahul and I sat side by side across an aisle on the last row. It was the final period of the day. Like any normal fourteen-year-old, we were eager to hear the final bell, and looked at the sky and the trees outside, sitting on wooden benches that had been living trees once.

For some reason, Rahul was in a particularly mischievous mood that afternoon. Every time the teacher, Adwaita Babu turned towards the black-board, he (Rahul, not the teacher) would pick up a piece of broken chalk – he had saved a neat pile of them – and throw it at me. I threw it back, dutifully. We both were enjoying this little game on the side of the Algebra lesson.

I guess the teacher wasn’t entirely unaware of it. Towards the end of the class, as I returned Rahul’s last missile, Adwaita babu had just turned back and caught me in action. (But naturally he didn’t see the first part of the act.) It was one of those minor errors of timing for which you miss a goal, but in a classroom, mistiming could have more serious consequences.

Adwaita babu calmly walked towards me and without wasting time on preliminaries, pulled me up by the collar gave me a solid thrashing in the limited time available to him before EOD, as my friends watched intently with shades of emotions ranging from genuine sympathy to pure joy.

It was aeons before corporal punishment was banned in schools and our wonderful teachers had to resort to this time-tested procedure to control the bunch of rowdies under their tutelage. We considered an occasional manhandling by our able-bodied male teachers as much a part of our boys-only school as was the majestic brass gong and the wooden hammer that hung in front of the headmaster’s room on the first floor. We took it in our stride, quite gracefully.

So when the class ended, I felt no ill will towards Adwaita Babu. But I thought it would be a good idea to pass on what I got to Rahul, because of several reasons. Firstly, it was he who had started it; secondly and more importantly, he was even thinner than I was.

So instead of leaving the classroom, I tapped him and invited him to duel. Rahul, who was a sport, accepted happily. Friends helped by moving desks to prepare a makeshift ring. (Recently, as I watched the opening scene of Dangal, I recalled that moment.)

Surprisingly, he gave me a tough fight and pushed me to a corner, hitting me repeatedly stretching his thin, long arms. I regretted my decision to engage him in combat, but hung on grimly. But I knew my goose had been cooked. … Suddenly, I managed to land a good right jab on the left of his face. Rahul bent down in excruciating pain, cupping his left eye. I won on TKO, much against the flow of the contest.

Rahul didn’t come to school the next day. And he couldn’t take the annual exam shortly thereafter – not because of the injury, to the best of my knowledge, but because of some serious illness. So we were never in the same class. I graduated from school a year before him and we didn’t meet for decades.

The victory in the skirmish didn’t give me any pleasure. I felt miserable to have hurt a good soul like Rahul and secretly, I carried a sense of guilt that time didn’t heal. The normal thing to do would have been to go to him and apologise. I thought of it often, but being the stupid oaf I was, I never got round to doing it. Or maybe, things like apologising seem too theatrical if you are 14 or 15.

*

Much later, maybe after 30 years, another classmate, Dipu and I were loafing around in Kolkata on a lazy Sunday evening when he said, ‘We’re quite close to Rahul’s home. Shall we barge in?’

That day, I was suffering from a bout of back ache, a rather severe one. In fact, for most of my adult life, I suffered from a debilitating condition for which there was no cure. A group of strong pain killers gave me some relief – but doctors say they also chew up the kidney. And I had reached a stage when anything less than a steroid made little difference. So most of the time, I suffered in silence, like that evening.

I had wanted to say goodbye to Dipu and take a taxi home, but grabbed the opportunity to meet Rahul. As we were crossing Vivekananda Park, suddenly electricity failed, plunging the area into darkness, but opening up the starry sky. I looked up. My mind too was enveloped in darkness. The pain shot up and I could hardly walk, … I just managed to drag my feet.

In the course of our chat, I managed to slip in the line that had wanted to say for decades, ‘Rahul, I've felt terrible ever since that day. But I’ve never told you. I hope …’

Rahul instantly knew what day I was talking about. He cut me short, ‘Yes, I thought you had made chutney of my eyeball … couldn’t see with my left eye for a few days ….’

He said this as if he was reliving a happy moment and broke into a beaming smile that said he’d put the incident well behind him.

The litmus test of friendship is when you meet a friend after a long time. If you have nothing to talk, if you have to hunt for common topics, you know that your friendship is dead. Nothing like that happened. We went on yakking until it was late, and parted reluctantly – lots of notes had to be put aside to be exchanged at the next meeting.

As Dipu and I walked towards the bus stop, I suddenly realised I didn’t have an iota of pain.

Kolkata / Tuesday, 24 January 2017

I won’t wish you a Happy New Year …

I won’t wish you a Happy New Year

For two reasons.

First, if you are a happy soul,

You’ll manage without good wishes.

But if you weren’t,

Mere goodwill wouldn’t possibly be of help.

Because – although it’s a timeworn cliché –

Happiness doesn’t depend on what’s outside,

But on how you are

within yourself.

Therefore, I’d just tell you

To keep being happy,

Or else, you must teach yourself

To be. No one else can.

To put it simply,

Let everyone become Bhutan.

*

I won’t wish you a Happy New Year

Because we’ve been wishing each other

Sometime from our heart,

Sometimes like programmed robots.

But it hasn’t really changed anything.

The year that’s going to end in an hour

And an added second

Has been terrible.

And if there was light

At the end of the proverbial tunnel,

We couldn’t see it.

You may say I am a cynic.

But in the time we live in,

It’s insane not to be one.

Haven’t we read about the Dark Ages,

That perhaps began with the murder

Of a woman, Hypatia,

A mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher,

And when a library was burnt down

In Alexandria?

These days,

Far too many women are being murdered.

And the contempt for

Scientists and social scientists

Is palpable.

Smart people do not think

They earn money … and live a good life.

Live a good life, enjoy!

Burn fire crackers

As the world is poised at the edge of a precipice.

Can we stop and think – 

What’s gone wrong?

And how much

I have added to the mess?

To put it simply,

Can we look within and say:

‘I’ll be the change I want to happen’?

And wish the world

Less violence,

Less falsehood, and

Less hatred

In 2017.

Bengaluru / 31 December 2016