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January 20, 2025 19 mins

For our series "An Army of Normal Dead Folks", Larry Reed tells the story of his friend Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 mostly Jewish children who were at risk of being killed by Nazi Germany. 

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
The first time in a national broadcast that his story
became known again around Britain. They called him to the studio,
put him in the front row, told him they were
going to tell his story for the first time in
fifty years. Didn't tell him who else was in the audience,
but the hostess of the TV program shows some of

(00:24):
the paraphernalia from that time, shows the list of children's
names that was found in his attic, tells the story,
and then she says, if by chance there might be
someone in this audience today who owes their life to
Nicholas Winton, please stand well. They had looked up those names,

(00:47):
trying to find as many of the children now in
their fifties and sixties as they could, and that's who
comprised the audience. And with NICKI seated in the front row,
everybody stands.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Portney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father,
I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach in
Inner City Memphis. And the last part somehow led to
an oscar for the film about our team. It's called Undefeated, y'all.
I believe our country's problems will never be solved by

(01:26):
a bunch of fancy people and nice suits talking big
words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox, but
rather by an army of normal folks. Guys, that's us,
just you and me deciding, Hey, you know what, maybe
I can help. And that's exactly what Nicholas Winton did.

(01:47):
Witten saved the lives of hundreds of children from the Nazis,
and today, along with Larry Reid, the author of Real Heroes,
we pay tribute to him as part of our special
series An Army of Normal Dead Folks. I cannot wait
for you to meet Nicholas Winton right after these brief

(02:07):
messages from our general sponsors. Okay, here is maybe I'm
not going to say my favorite of the group, but

(02:28):
chapter twenty five is Nicholas Winton, the humblest hero, and
I absolutely love his story. And here's one I'd never
heard the name mentioned before. Tell us the story of
our humblest hero, Nicholas Winton.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
This is one bill that I can tell from some
personal experience, really, because he is one of the few
people in my book that I actually came to know myself.
Really visited him a half dozen times. That's fabulous in London.
He's the oldest man that I ever came to know.
He passed away in twenty fifteen at the age of

(03:08):
one oh six.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Holy smokes, and it did. I didn't know that part either. Oh.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
There was a documentary done about him called The Power
of Good. You can see it in excerpts on YouTube,
way back in the early two thousands. I had not
heard his story before I saw that documentary.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Honestly, his story was Schindler Schindler's List Isheah, it's similar,
It is different, but similar. But tell us the story
because it is an absolute, unbelievable story of compassion and
care and risk and humility. And if you think about

(03:51):
the generation after generation of what he did, I mean,
untold numbers of lives today are on earth because of him.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, more than six thousand as a matter of fact, phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Well.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Nicki went and went by Nicki most of the time.
Was a twenty nine year old stockbroker in nineteen thirty eight,
and remember that was the last full year of peace
before the outbreak of the Second World War. And Nicki
was a very successful stockbroker. He was on his way

(04:31):
to becoming a wealthy man, and he had planned a
trip to Switzerland for a Christmas time nineteen thirty eight.
This was just two months or three months after the
Munich Agreement, where Britain and France said to Hitler, Okay,
if you just take the Sudatean land, the fringe area
of Czechoslovakia and don't move any further, we won't go

(04:54):
to war.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
This is basically Neville Chamberlain, yes, trying to pacify Hitler
by allowing Hitler to possess land that she shouldn't be
possessing and thinking, okay, well that'll be enough. Neville Chamberlain
never understood that Hitler was just wedding his beak.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, that was called appeasement even at that time by
Chamberlain's foes, and it was appeasement.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
You know. Interestingly, I can't help but wonder if we're
dealing with the same thing today with Putin and Ukraine.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, you can make a good argument for that. What
a tragic situation.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
I mean for our listeners to get a similar feel.
You know, Putin has invaded Ukraine and taken certain parts
of it, and while the Western world has armed Ukraine
to defend itself. It certainly hasn't come to Ukraine's rescue.

(05:57):
And I think the vast majority of us think of
it as an international irritant that we just wish was over.
And if we could come up with some way to
get Putin to just take what he wants and back
off and everybody quit fighting, it'll be just fine. That
is exactly what people thought of Hitler back in this time,
and the appeasement in this case. If we said, sure,

(06:20):
putin keep Crimea and a little bit of land you
got from Ukraine, and can we just all call it nice?
While that sounds good, That's exactly what Chamberlain's approach to
Hitler was with Czechoslovakia. Give them this a little bit
of Czechoslovakia. He'll back off and that'll be the end
of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Just a few weeks back in October, I visited the
three Baltic states, so Latvia, Lithuitia and Estonia.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
And beautiful by the way, Oh yeah, I love it there,
I do too.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, wonderful.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Did you go to Taland? Yes, I did, phenomenal. Did
you go to old school Taland? The old I did
city Taland with the cobblestones.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
I did, and then poor Vu up over in near Helsinki.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Stunning and the history there's phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Oh yeah, the ferry ride from Talent to Helsinki, Finland
was incredible.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
To you, it is incredible. I've done that. Oh fantastics.
Actually I do business over there. Okay, So anyway, I digress.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
You go ahead, and a few months excuse me, before that,
in May, I was in Moldova, former Soviet satellite, and
I can tell you that people in all those countries
strongly believe that if Putin gets away with what he's
doing in Ukraine, that they'll be next. They don't think
that he wants just Ukraine or a portion of it.

(07:41):
They think, no, this is this is the guy who
will move on whatever he thinks he can take. So
there's a lot of concern over there for that.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Okay, so let's take that. That's two weeks ago. Yeah,
So let's go back to nineteen thirty nine. It was
really the same thing. The only difference was it was
Hitler with Czechlisfakia. Yeah, and because nobody wanted to waste
lives and riches and money on defending any of it,

(08:14):
it was let's a peace. Hitler Yeah, let's give him
this little peace and then he'll stop. And that was
the hope. That's right.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
And after that Munichue conference that gave in the Sudanan Land,
lots of people in Europe breathed a sigh of relief.
They thought, oh, we've dodged a bullet.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Everything's okay. Yeah, no war, no little did they know?
That's right.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Nicki wenton knew otherwise, but nonetheless he was going to
Switzerland for Christmas vacation when a friend of his, who
worked in the British embassy in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia,
contacted him and said, NICKI, don't go to Switzerland. Come
here is something you have to see and I will
take you around well. And this is depicted in the

(08:56):
recent movie made about Nicki Winton, in which Anthony Hopkins
plays the lead role. Nicki agrees and he goes to
Prague and what his friend wants him to see are
the refugee camps at the onset of winter in and
around Prague, full of thousands of Jewish families who had
escaped from the Sudanan Land, some from Germany itself, also

(09:18):
from Poland. They had no place to go. The world said,
we don't have any problem. We signed an agreement. You're
not in any danger. But they knew otherwise. They knew
that Hitler was on the move and it would only
be a matter of time before they took the rest
of Czechoslovakia and they would be in danger again. So
Nicki toured these camps and lo and behold of mothers

(09:41):
and fathers would come up to him. He's a perfect stranger.
They would come up to him and beg him to
take their children to safety, saying, we can't get out,
no government will let us come in, but can you
perhaps do something to take our children to safety. Nicki
could have said, well, I'm only one person.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Can you imagine the gut wrenching decision and the desperation
you just have as a parent to offer your child
to a stranger.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Perfect stranger.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yeah, how desperate must it have really been to walk
up to a stranger and offer up your child in
hopes of saving their life because you know the impending doom.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
That's about about to fall upon you.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
It's just unfathomable.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
It's for us to think that way through, to understand
the context of what this was.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Well, immediately Nicky sent letters and telegrams to governments all
over the world asking if I can get at least
the children out, will you allow them into your country.
Guess how many countries responded in the affirmative I.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Would say, I don't I read it. I remember it's
very few, very few, including the United States said heck no, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
You got a letter from the White House saying sorry, thing,
we can do. Only two countries his own Britain and
Sweden said yes, we will let them come. But Britain,
his own Britain, did put conditions on it. They said, well,
we think this is just going to blow over and
they're going to have to go back, and we don't
want to get stuck with the cost of that. So
you have to put on deposit with the Home Office

(11:20):
the equivalent in today's money of about three thousand dollars
per child, and you have to find foster families who
agree to take them in. Well, Nicky knew that the
clock was sticking. He had to act fast because he
thought it was only a matter of time before war
would break out in the end. Over the first eight
months of nineteen thirty nine, he organized nine rail transports

(11:45):
of children, did all the documentation found the foster families
willing to take them in back in Britain, did all
that legal work, raise the money to get them out,
even as Prague was occupied by the Germans in March
of thirty nine, working to get the kids out under
the noses of the Nazi officials. The first eight of

(12:05):
those transports contained six hundred and sixty nine children, somewhere
as young as one year old.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
Going to the UK and Sweden.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, a few to Sweden. Overwhelmingly they went to foster
families in Great Britain.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
How in the world do you wind up round up
seven hundred families since such short period of time that
says I will take children I've never seen before. Unbelievable
that in and of itself. I mean, I can't even
imagine getting the trains put together, and probably a bunch
of fake documents and working under you know, the kind

(12:38):
of cloak and dagger under the radar thing. I mean,
in some respects he's a British Harry Tubman. Incept. It
wasn't an underground railroad, it was actually a railroad. Yeah,
But the point is all of that, but to find
that many families to say yes to he had to
have been a man possessed. Oh he was.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
He took pictures of all the children and used the
pictures to help encourage foster family, so they could look
at pictures and say, well, I'll take a child of
say four, and I'd rather it be a boy. And
if I can look at a picture, I'm more likely
to say I'll take that one. So he had to
do that. He had a ninth transport organized. It was

(13:22):
to be the largest of all the ones that he arranged.
It had two hundred and fifty children. This is an
addition to the six hundred and sixty nine who had
first gotten out. The ninth transport had two hundred and
fifty ready to go foster families awaiting them in Britain.
On the first of September nineteen thirty nine, the day
the Second World War broke out, the Nazis stopped all

(13:46):
rail transports, took those kids off the train. Not a
single one of those two hundred and fifty children survived.
That explains, and I can tell you from knowing him personally,
why he couldn't talk about this for fifty years. The
story kind of died out.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
So it wasn't about the eleven trains that he saved.
It was about the twelfth that he lost. That's right.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
It was the two hundred and fifty he knew were
ready to go and did not survive for fifty years.
The children who were saved grew up in these foster homes,
and the story had kind of died out and wasn't
widely known how they got there, who was responsible for
it until in nineteen eighty eight his wife. He didn't

(14:30):
even tell her this. He met her after the war.
Soon as the war broke out, he joined the RAF
and fought in the Air Force for six years, then
met the woman who became his wife. Never even told
her what he had done. But in nineteen eighty eight
she was going through the attic and found a box
full of pictures of children, visa materials, documentation, a list

(14:53):
of names, and went Toyman, said, Nikki, what's this. Well,
that's when he told her the story. The story got
out verified. Queen Elizabeth knighted him. So he was Sir
Nicholas Winton. And you've got to see this bill on YouTube.

(15:14):
If you type in his name Nicholas Winton, you will
find a clip of the first time in a national
broadcast that his story became known again around Britain. They
called him to the studio, put him in the front row,
told him they were going to tell his story for
the first time in fifty years. Didn't tell him who

(15:34):
else was in the audience. But the hostess of the
TV program shows some of the paraphernalia from that time,
shows the list of children's names that was found in
his attic, tells the story, and then she says, if
by chance there might be someone in this audience today

(15:55):
who owes their life to Nicholas Winton, please stand.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Well.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
They had looked up those names, trying to find as
many of the children now in their fifties and sixties
as they could, and that's who comprised the audience, and
with Nicki seated in the front row, everybody stands. And
that was his first renewal of the connection with those kids,
and they were able to thank him in person. And

(16:23):
now we know that the numbers of people who survived
who lived because of Nicki wenton. That is the six
hundred and sixty nine that he saved, some amount their
children and grandchildren. It's approaching seven thousand people who owe
their existence to this one man who could have walked

(16:44):
away but said I'm going to do everything I can.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Who could have walked away like everyone else before him
had yeah, all the way up to the Prime Minister
of the UK.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
Exactly right, exactly right. What an extraordinary man. Every time
I visited Niki in his later years, in his nineties
and after he turned one hundred, I would take groups
of students from America and have them watch the documentary
about him beforehand, And anytime one of the students in
his presence would say something like, oh, sir Nicholas, you're

(17:16):
such a hero, he would immediately say, oh, no, no, no,
don't call me that. I just did what I could.
I mean, what a humble man. And this underscore is
the fact that what he did that's saved so many lives,
he did not for fame, not for fortune. He could
have written a book about it, probably a best seller,
you know, fifty years before the story became known. What

(17:38):
he did he did quietly, and he did because of
the good that it represented, because it helped and saved
those children. Not for fame, not for fortune, not for himself,
but to save lives.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Nicholas went the humblest hero remarkable, remarkable, and thank you
for joining us on this special series of our ridiculously
titled and Army of Normal Dead Folks. It's ridiculous. But

(18:17):
if Nicholas Witten or other episodes have inspired you in general,
or better yet, to take action by acting heroically in
our time buying Larry Reid's book Real Heroes where the
story came from, and I'm telling you, guys, buy the
book and read it. It's well worth it. Or if
you have story ideas for the series, please let me know.

(18:40):
I'd love to hear about it. We'd love to keep
this ridiculously titled series going, but we need historians to
tell us about Army of Normal dead folks and we'll
do the research and highlight them. We think it's interesting stuff.
So if you do that, write me anytime at Bill
at normal Folks dot us and I promise you I

(19:01):
will respond and Alex will probably do the work and
will end up doing a show. If you enjoyed this episode,
share it with friends that on social subscribe to the podcast,
rate and review it, Join our Army at Normalfolks dot us,
consider becoming a premium member there any and all of

(19:22):
these things that will help us grow an army of
normal folks. Thanks for our producer, Iron Light Labs. I'm
Bill Courtney. I'll see you next time.
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Bill Courtney

Bill Courtney

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