One Life
The True Story of Sir Nicholas Winton and the Prague Kindertransport
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- € 19,99
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Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia at the brink of World War II. Most never saw their parents again. This is his story.
*Now a major motion picture starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter*
In 1938, 29-year-old "Nicky" cancelled a ski trip and instead spent nine months masterminding a seemingly impossible plan to rescue hundreds of Jewish children and find them homes in the United Kingdom. Over 6,000 people are alive today because of his efforts.
What motivated an ordinary man to do something so extraordinary? This book, written by his daughter, Barbara, explores the 106-year life of an incredible humanitarian, a man whose legacy only came to public light decades later.
His life story is a clarion call to choose action over apathy in the face of injustice, and a reminder that every one of us can change the world.
"If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"There are around 6,000 people in the world today who owe their lives to Nicholas Winton," writes his late daughter in this straightforward account of his life, referring to the descendants of the refugee children he rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939. Winton's story is well-known thanks to a famous 1988 episode of the British TV show That's Life in which he was unwittingly sitting in an audience surrounded by the children, now adults, he had saved. The author, while offering a brief summary of how he arranged the escape trains, is more focused on "what impelled a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker" to take on such a monumental task. Tracing Nicholas's life from his childhood in a well-to-do Jewish family to his student days, his career in finance, and his postretirement charity work, Winton is determined to "show the whole person... not just the myth." Unfortunately, she does too good a job, perhaps taking too literally the centenarian's request before his death in 2015 that her biography avoid "hero worship." She writes that he was pushy, operated with a disregard for finding consensus, and induced "discomfort, dislike and irritation" in others—undoubtedly poor qualities in a father, but fitting ones for a hero. Readers will be left yearning for more details regarding the event that made this ordinary man extraordinary in the first place.
