In 1938 a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled a ski holiday and took a train to Prague. Jewish families there were trying to get their children out before the Germans arrived. Winton set up a table in a hotel and started a list. He found British families willing to take a child. He raised the fifty pounds the government demanded for each one. He arranged the trains.

Between March and August of 1939 he sent 669 children across Europe to England and safety. The last and largest train, carrying over two hundred more, sat ready to leave Prague on the day the war began. It never moved. He carried that one for the rest of his life.