♪ >> This is a story that remained hidden for nearly 50 years.

It began when German troops arrived at the gates of Prague.

It's the incredible rescue of Jewish children who were otherwise condemned to death.

>> I was a 7-year-old little girl.

Many people were scared.

I knew that I was Jewish.

>> On the 15th of March 1939, the Wehrmacht entered the Czechoslovakian capital.

>> My father was on the list of the Gestapo, to be arrested.

>> In London, young Nicholas Winton, a city banker, was packing his bags.

His destination?

Prague.

>> Was this gentleman who came to Prague.

He could arrange for children at risk to be taken to England.

>> In his hotel room, Nicholas Winton became a forger and a printer of false passports and visas.

>> Here are two pictures which were taken for our passports.

>> Winton bought the Nazis' silence.

Hundreds of children headed for Prague Station.

Over the next few months, eight trains left the city.

>> My father was crying.

For me that was the most shocking thing.

It was very painful.

>> With a label and a number for each child, a ticket to freedom.

>> And they put labels around our necks and gave a number.

>> It was a one-way trip for the soon-to-be-orphaned children.

>> All the people outside were crying.

Everybody was saying, "See you soon."

And that was the last time 85% of the children saw their parents.

[ Train whistle blows ] >> 669 Jewish children from Prague were saved.

Yet Nicholas Winton never mentioned this event.

Then, nearly 50 years later on, his wife discovered his lost album in the attic.

She entrusted it to a well-known journalist.

>> This is his scrapbook.

>> Invited to a popular BBC show in 1988, Nicholas Winton suddenly found himself seated amongst the very children that he had saved.

These children -- Milena, Alice, Suzanah, John, Felix, and Jiri -- have recounted the story that became a legend about this man who had but a single motto.

>> I work on the motto that if something is not impossible, there must be a way of doing it.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> On the 28th of February 1988, Esther Rantzen, a star reporter for the BBC, caused a television sensation when she publicly displayed on the air the journal of an unknown man named Nicholas Winton.

According to his notes, he had saved 669 Jewish children from Prague in 1939.

And, surprisingly, today, 50 years later, they're sitting right next to him.

>> As a journalist, this was the most extraordinary, wonderful story.

♪ >> It all began one afternoon during the winter of 1987, in a London suburb, when Mrs. Winton was cleaning her attic.

At the bottom of an old suitcase, she found a leather album.

Turning the pages, she realized that she had stumbled on her husband's journal.

♪ ♪ ♪ Documents, reports, photographs, everything indicated that her husband, Nicholas Winton, had participated in an extraordinary mission of rescuing children on the eve of the Second World War... ♪ ♪ ♪ ...an event her humble husband had never, ever mentioned.

>> I don't think anybody who was in a war or in a war situation talks about it afterwards.

I mean, I wasn't any more modest than anybody else who'd been in danger during the war.

>> Nicholas Winton's grandparents, originally named Wertheim, were German Jews who had moved to London at the end of the 19th century.

Rudolph and Barbara gave their children a typical British education, and the young Nicholas was baptized in the Anglican Church.

An accomplished athlete, he was training for the next Olympic Games with the British fencing team.

With the rise of Nazism, the Wertheims decided to Anglicize their name.

Found by chance in a telephone directory, the name "Winton" sounded just right, so the entire family adopted it.

As a young man, Nicholas Winton worked in the city and was extremely successful.

A brilliant trader, he spoke fluent German and traveled throughout Europe on business.

Winton had already realized that the rise of Hitler might bring Europe to war.

>> It was being in the right frame of mind, knowing what was happening politically in the country.

Know what was happening politically on the continent and not believing that what we were doing was correct.

>> On the 30th of September 1938, the Munich Agreement was concluded, and a large part of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Germany.

Europe closed its eyes.

For Hitler, it was a victory without a battle.

In exchange for this fool's bargain, Germany promised Europe peace for a thousand years.

Largely populated by German-speaking peoples, Sudetenland was annexed by Hitler, who dreamed of founding a greater Germanic reich.

And in Prague, the sound of the approaching boots worried the Jewish community.

>> I was a 7-year-old little girl, but I knew that many people were scared.

I knew that I was Jewish, and many of several of my friends were not Jewish.

And I kept looking in the mirror to see why was I different, and I didn't think I was different.

>> It was clear that it would be a bit uncomfortable for Jews when in German hands because we knew about the Kristallnacht, yes, and all what was happening at that time to Jews in Germany.

So, we knew that the same things will happen to us here later.

>> In November 1938, the fury of the Kristallnacht inflamed the entire Reich.

Synagogues were burnt, stores were pillaged, hundreds of Jews were assassinated, and thousands of others were thrown into camps.

The Jewish community in Prague was left without much hope.

>> Yes, we knew.

My father was head of the Jewish community in Prague.

>> In London, sleeping under carpets of snow, all thoughts were on peace.

Hitler had so promised, and Christmas was approaching.

Nicholas Winton, who had just celebrated his 29th birthday, was preparing for his winter holidays... in Switzerland, for his salary as a trader permitted such luxuries.

But as he was packing his suitcase and his skis, a telephone call suddenly changed his plans and his life forever.

>> Just before Christmas 1938, my father was getting ready to go on a skiing holiday with his close friend, Martin Blake.

He got a phone call from Martin, and Martin told him that he wasn't going skiing.

The holiday was canceled and he was in Prague and that my father should come out and see what he was up to instead of going on holiday.

>> Liverpool Street Station in central London...

If Martin Blake, his best friend, had called him, then it was urgent.

Switzerland and skiing were quickly forgotten.

His new destination was Prague.

A long journey... Winton only knew that Martin worked for a mysterious committee of refugees and that he needed help.

The assignation was at the Sroubek Hotel, the best hotel in Prague.

>> My father went and booked into the hotel where Martin was staying, the Hotel Sroubek.

And the first thing Martin did was took him and introduced him to Doreen Warriner, who was the lady that he was working with, who was running the Prague end of an operation called the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.

And after a few days, Doreen suggested that he should go out and look at one of the refugee camps.

>> And those that had families to go to were with their families.

But a lot of the people who were in danger from Hitler were just put in camps.

And it was in the camps in this winter that I saw what was happening.

>> It was a shock for the young trader.

German and Austrian Jews were fleeing the Nazi pogroms.

Czechoslovakian Jews were driven from their homes in Sudetenland, and everyone was crowded into miserable camps on the outskirts of Prague.

The sight of starving children left out in the cold overwhelmed him.

Renouncing his skiing holiday, Winton decided to act.

Given the urgency of the situation, the young banker became a forger.

With a homemade stamp and the authentic letterheaded stationery of the Committee for Refugees, he invented and created a children's section.

It was a stroke of genius and a perfect deception.

A few telegrams to London, to the Home Office, misled the authorities and officialized the action.

It was a race against time.

Although the Germans were not yet actually in Prague, Gestapo agents had already begun to hunt down political opponents and Jews.

>> My father suddenly received a message.

Would he leave immediately because his name was on the list of the Gestapo, to be arrested.

And suddenly my father disappeared.

>> There was this gentleman who came to a hotel in Prague.

He could arrange for children at risk to be taken to England.

And somehow my mother learned of this and went to the Hotel Sroubek with a photograph of Milena and myself.

>> Among the Jewish community, it moved like a forest fire.

They got -- everybody got to know about it.

That's why they queued up so in front of his office.

>> Winton's room became the headquarters of the committee.

By 6:00 in the morning, the halls of the Sroubek Hotel were already crowded.

Panic-stricken families wanted to meet this Englishman who could, so it was said, save their children.

♪ ♪ >> My mother came to us and said would we -- would we come with her and come to Wenceslas Square to a hotel, where there were some people we were supposed to meet?

>> From dawn until dusk, Nicholas Winton met the families.

[ Typewriter clacking ] Perfectly organized and trained by his years as a banker, he recorded and organized his lists of the children in danger.

[ Clacking continues ] In two weeks, he established an initial list of 400 children in urgent need of help.

♪ The task was considerable, time was lacking, and the trader's official holidays were coming to an end.

So, he addressed an ultimate request to his employers in London.

>> So, he wrote to his boss in London in the city and said, "I need another week's holiday.

I'm helping the refugee effort out here."

And he got a letter back saying, you know, "It's all very well working with refugees over there.

You know, we don't really know what's going on over there.

We'd much rather you were back here making money for us."

>> Winton was obliged to return to London, but he managed to finance the opening of an emergency office in Prague.

He delegated these operations to Trevor Chadwick, a young Englishman who had his confidence.

[ Bell ringing ] ♪ On the 21st of January 1939, Nicholas Winton returned to his bank.

He had but one obsession -- to obtain authorization from the British authorities to let the Jewish children from Prague come to Britain.

>> The stock exchange finished at 3:30 in the afternoon, so my father would go home from the stock exchange.

And the others would probably already be working there, getting on with it.

And so he would join in and start what he called his real work in the late afternoon and evening.

>> Nicholas Winton opened up an office in his family home in London at 3 Willow Road.

Barbara, his mother, and two volunteers helped him.

The mission was colossal.

At the beginning of February, the officials at the ministry finally gave their consent to allow the children to enter Britain.

Their conditions were simple.

For each child, a foster family must be found and a guarantee of £50 paid to finance their return.

In order to find such families, Winton prepared catalogs with six photographs of the children per page.

It was a simple and effective idea.

These catalogs were sent to the newspapers and to all charity organizations.

The influx of mail was considerable, and the local post office began to ask questions about the activities of this strange man.

>> You would have a policeman who would knock on the door and say, "Why are you getting all this mail from Czechoslovakia?"

He would have to explain to them what he was doing because they were getting a bit suspicious that he was some kind of agent or something.

>> This is what Nicky sent all over England to find parents for me.

He sent to all magazines and newspapers.

He made us photograph.

I always say that I was sold with this photograph.

>> For Winton, the means didn't matter.

Only the results counted.

All of England answered the call.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> People said they want a boy or a girl approximately that age or that age.

And he sent them six children all together on one card.

And people would choose from the six.

>> The potential adoptive families came to the office in Willow Road.

Years later, one of the children who was adopted called this moment the "Lottery of Life."

♪ A pencil mark designated an adopted child.

The others, those not chosen, were doomed to disappear.

15,000 Jewish Czechoslovakian children were to perish in the death camps.

In the Jewish community, however, several voices spoke out against Winton's methods.

>> One day he had a group of rabbis who came to his home and said to him that they understood he was bringing Jewish children to U.K. and placing them in Christian homes and that this must stop.

>> And Winton was quite cross.

He said, "Look."

He said, "First of all, it's none of your business.

And, secondly, would you rather have a dead Jew or a live Jew living with a Christian family?

Good afternoon."

>> For Hitler, the solution was simple.

A good Jew was a dead Jew.

>> Wherever we were, we had to listen to Hitler ranting on and his voice ranting on about the Jews and the Jews and the Jews.

His voice is locked in the back of my head.

And if anybody says, "The Jews" in a loud voice, I don't hear their voice.

I hear Hitler's voice.

>> We were scared.

People said he was dangerous and said he was going to kill most of the Jews that lived in his area and not just the Jews, but others who were uncomfortable to him.

>> Hitler had promised a thousand years of peace following the Munich Agreement -- a very strange peace indeed.

On the 15th of March 1939, German troops entered Prague without meeting any resistance.

The Fuhrer had threatened to flatten the city if the occupation was opposed.

>> My mother was standing near the radio, and she was crying.

And that morning she didn't wake me up to go to school.

I said to her, "Why didn't you wake me?

It's daylight already."

And she said, "You will not be going to that school anymore."

♪ ♪ >> It was like a river of gray -- the German soldiers on motorcycles, inside cars, lorries full of soldiers.

And it was like a river of gray going down that road.

>> There were crowds facing them as they marched through the streets.

And one or two of the people, a small number of them, cheered and "heiled," of course.

>> On the 16th of March, Adolf Hitler inspected his troops at Prague Castle and proclaimed the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Czechoslovakia no longer existed, and the trap had closed on 300,000 Czechoslovakian Jews.

>> It was already looking very bad.

One day, Mother told me, "You'll stop going to learn German.

Now you're going to learn English."

>> One day my father called Arthur and me to go and sit down.

He got something to tell us.

And he said, "You're going on a long journey.

You're going to a country called England.

We can't come with you.

But for the moment, you've got to go alone."

♪ ♪ [ Bell rings ] ♪ >> In the committee's office, the team became active.

They needed to prepare the last travel documents for the children who were selected for adoption.

Nicholas Winton negotiated with the Gestapo and paid in order to have trains available to leave Prague.

>> Here are two pictures, which were taken before we left for England.

They were taken of my brother and myself, as you can see, for our passports.

>> In London, the authorities still didn't understand the urgency of the situation.

They didn't believe that war was coming, so there was no expediency in delivering the needed visas.

But for Winton, if a thing was not impossible, then there must be a way of doing it.

So, he secretly bought a press for printing false visas.

He had to move quickly.

Another train must leave before it was too late.

>> I remember we were sitting in the kitchen having breakfast, and all at once a sound at the door.

So, Mother went there and brought the telegram that we are leaving already on the 18th.

And this change of the date, that it would be earlier, that I would leave my mother earlier, made me cry.

And then that made my mother cry, also, that I am crying.

She started to cry.

[ Clock chiming ] >> On the night of the 31st of July 1939, a sad procession crossed Charles Bridge towards the station.

After the convoys in March, April, and June, the eighth train commissioned by Winton waited in the station.

>> We went to the station, and I started to cry and lose, you know, my courage.

And so, I begged them not to take me, keep me home, and I would eat my spinach is what I said, because I didn't like spinach.

>> At the Central Station in Prague, 68 children were getting ready to leave their parents.

>> I remember Prague Station.

I can still see it.

Prague Station, anxious parents, my mother and a friend looking at the children, parents looking at their children, not knowing whether they'd ever see them again, German soldiers with swastikas in the background.

[ Soldiers speaking in German ] >> There were also some German soldiers.

At least I thought they were soldiers.

They were Germans in uniform that were checking their lists.

>> For the Germans, the operation was lucrative.

Winton was ridding them of Jewish children and paying them for it -- £1,000 pounds per train, not counting the price of the visas and tickets.

>> And they put labels around our necks.

And here it gave a number.

>> Three labels were distributed -- two for the luggage, which was limited to clothing, and one per child.

Jewelry and objects of value were forbidden, and only 10 marks were allowed for the journey.

>> The label was a regular luggage label, brown.

On one side, it had the number "639" and "British Refugee Committee."

>> One of the things getting on the train, in our case, it wasn't a rail ticket.

It was a label, a label with our name and our number and also a visa, a permit that we could travel.

♪ ♪ [ Child speaking native language ] >> My father, who was a very strong person, he was crying.

He was crying, which is the most shocking.

For me, that was the most shocking thing because he was a very strong man.

And for him to be crying, it was very painful.

♪ ♪ >> My father first walked me out along the platform and told me never to lie, never to steal, and to study hard.

But my mind was already on the train.

>> Many of the children thought that they were only leaving for a few days, for a few weeks' holidays.

Not all of the parents were able to confess to their children that they were handing them over to perfect strangers in order to save them from the Nazis.

>> What I remember most is that I was in the train, inside the train, in the compartment, and looking out of the windows, and outside on the platform, all the people outside were crying.

>> My mother tore herself away from my father and ran to the train and hugged me.

And I was crying very hard.

And I kept saying, "Why?

Why do I have to go?"

Take me home."

And she said, "We're sending you because we love you.

We want you to be able to play, to go to school, to learn all of these things you can't do here now."

♪ ♪ ♪ >> Children go onto the train.

And there were some that were babies in arms, and the mothers then went and tried to get them back.

And it was all together very sad.

>> We wanted her to keep my little sister.

We kept on telling my mother to take her, to keep her.

And then she took her off again and put her back on.

At the last minute, as the train was pulling out, she put her back on the train.

♪ [ Train whistle blows ] >> As the train was leaving, my mother quite suddenly took her wristwatch off and passed it through the window to me and said, "This is for you to remember us by."

♪ ♪ >> Everybody was saying, "See you soon."

And that was the last time 85% of the children saw their parents.

[ Train whistle blows ] [ Conductor whistles ] >> My parents say, "We will be coming after you very soon."

I believe them.

I was convinced that they will be coming very soon.

If I were not convinced that they will come after us and that was the last time I would see them there, I would never left, of course not.

♪ >> As the train was leaving, we held hands, and we said... [ Speaking in native language ] "We're not going to cry."

♪ >> The Germans authorized children from the age of a few months to the age of 17 to leave.

>> I had a little case, a knapsack in which I had my sandwiches.

My mother had made some sandwiches with salami and stuff, Czech sausages.

And I didn't know that.

All I know is that on the journey, German soldiers occasionally looked in and went out again.

>> The Germans came in.

They were making a terrible noise, and they looked through everybody's luggage.

They threw everything on the floor, trampled on it.

♪ ♪ Germans started behaving like that.

We became afraid, and we realized that something was wrong, that it was not just an adventure.

>> Nuremberg, Cologne -- the whole Grand Reich had to be crossed.

But at the end of the journey, freedom -- the Port of Hook in Holland.

>> It wasn't until we actually crossed the border to Holland that we suddenly started feeling free, and the windows were opened.

Up until then, they kept them strictly closed.

>> When we crossed the border to Holland, we shouted, "...the Germans.

...Hitler and Goebbels and Goering."

>> After the train had left Germany, smiles and human warmth reappeared.

>> There was a whole group of ladies in the Holland national costume waiting for us with cocoa and sandwiches for us and refreshments.

And what they gave us of sandwiches made out of white bread, and none of us will ever forget it because they made white bread, which we never had seen before.

>> When the ladies left with their hats, they took us onto a boat, a big boat, and that was the boat going across the channel.

♪ ♪ >> The sailors running the ship, they were so welcoming and so friendly that the atmosphere changed.

And we...

It was an overnight journey from Holland to England.

>> By morning they were in the Port of Harwich, the gateway to England, the gateway to a new life for these poor, displaced children.

>> I recall the date when we left, which was indeed my birthday.

And I always used to recall that I left when I was 13 years old.

And when I journeyed to England, I became 14 years old all of a sudden.

>> And from there, they took one last train to London.

From all over England, adoptive parents were waiting for their child, for the little stranger they had chosen from a photograph.

♪ Nicholas Winton was present for every train that arrived with his newly found wards.

>> We were 200 children in a big hall with our names around our necks and Englishmen and -women were going around the group, turning our labels over, looking for the children that they were going to foster.

>> There was quite a bit of confusion.

People were searching, watching each other.

This was the children's first meeting with their adoptive parents.

The children looked lost.

They were comforted.

Tea was served.

>> There were some nurses, and a nurse handed me a cup of English tea.

It was most shocking drink I've ever had.

It was the strongest tea with milk in it.

>> A lady found my brother and me and took us to a desk and signed us out.

And it took us out from Liverpool Street Station.

And the first thing I saw there was a double-decker bus.

I had never seen anything so tall before.

I was sure it was going to turn over.

That was quite the frightening moment, seeing these enormous buses.

I'd never seen anything like it.

>> Clinging to their new parents, the children left for unknown cities and rural districts.

Only one group of children remained, those too old to be adopted.

Winton hadn't found families for them, but he had disregarded the regulations.

He couldn't just abandon them in Prague.

Nothing was impossible for Winton.

>> Nobody had actually wanted to look after two boys that big.

My parents insisted that they were not to separate us from each other.

So, then they sent us to a camp up in the northeast of England.

>> The children who were without families were sent west to Wales.

The Czechoslovakian government in exile had transformed a manor house there to receive them, a haven of peace.

Since March 1939, eight trains had already made the journey from Prague, and 669 children had found refuge in England.

But time was running out.

On his list, Winton still had the names of 5,000 children who were ready to leave.

♪ ♪ Night falls on Prague.

Nicholas and his team are preparing their biggest convoy.

250 children were about to leave their parents in Prague for London, where 250 adoptive families were awaiting them.

>> Mommy?

Mommy!

[ Dogs barking ] >> A hopeless wait, for Winton's ninth train was never to leave.

On the 1st of September 1939, German troops invaded Poland, and Europe was plunged into war.

All borders were closed.

It was a deadly trap for the 250 children on the ninth train.

>> Well, I regret the last transport, of course, which would have been our biggest, which was due to leave on the 1st of September, which of course never left.

And that, of course, is something one can never forget.

Quite apart from all the work that went into finding 250 families to take them, to get the money to send 250 people to England, the fact remains that 250 children but for one day would have been in safety.

And as far as one knows, all -- I think one occasionally hears one or two that survived -- but most of them died.

>> On the 3rd of September 1939, England entered the war.

A pacifist at heart, Winton joined the Red Cross, but, shocked by Nazi brutality, and, as he was an amateur civil pilot, he joined the Royal Air Force.

♪ ♪ From the Czech boardinghouse in Wales, where they listened to the radio, the older children also wanted to join the armed forces.

They wanted to serve England and Czechoslovakia.

>> I'd been wanting to join the army from the word "go" for from the time I got to England because I didn't like Hitler.

There's no other answer.

I wanted to do something to help and destroy the German armed forces.

♪ >> Jiri was 15 years old when he had arrived in England.

Three years had passed.

Now he was 18 and could finally join the 311th Squadron, a Czech unit attached to the British Royal Air Force.

Jiri was a machine gunner on a bomber and took part in the fighting in the Atlantic.

Jiri Kafka, Ben Abeles, a number of the children from Prague contributed to the Allies victory.

On the morning of the 9th of May 1945, Princess Elizabeth, the future queen, addressed a jubilant crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

After six years of war, D-Day was being celebrated.

It was a day of joy and a day of sadness.

Victory was being celebrated, but the dead were also being mourned.

>> My brother and I received a letter from Czechoslovakia.

Inside it was a farewell letter for my parents.

At first, when I saw the letter, I thought, "Oh, they're alive."

And then I read the letter, and I realized, "No, they're not."

>> A letter from beyond the grave -- John Fieldsend and his brother were not to receive it until four years later.

These were the last words their parents had written, only a few days before being deported to the Terezin camp to the east of Prague.

>> My mother wrote, "Dear boys, when you receive the letter, the war will be over.

We want to say farewell to you, who were our dearest possession in the world, and only for a short time were we able to keep you.

We are going into the unknown.

Not a word is to be heard from those already taken.

Thank the campsters who have kept you from a similar fate.

You took, of course, a piece of your poor parents' hearts with you when we decided to give you away.

Give our thanks and gratitude to all who are good to you."

How my parents could write so gently and knowing that we were about to go to camp, I don't know.

It's a beautiful letter, and I'm so proud of them.

>> Victims of starvation and brutality, 33,000 Jews died and were incinerated in the Terezin crematorium.

The remaining 90,000 took the train...to Auschwitz.

>> It must have been a redeeming idea for the parents when they were in the gas chambers that they knew that they had saved at least their children.

♪ >> The whole family murdered in Auschwitz.

If they hadn't sent us away, we wouldn't have survived, either.

>> They had saved their children.

They now rest in the Terezin cemetery.

♪ ♪ >> At the end of the war, all the people that stayed in this country, the children who were taken in by English families, a lot of them didn't want to return because they knew they had no parents.

And eventually we dispersed into 11 different countries.

>> When the war was over, Nicholas Winton did not return to work in the stock exchange.

He joined the IRO, the International Refugee Organization.

His mission was to recover Jewish property stolen by the Nazis.

In Paris, he met Grete, a Danish woman.

They married and settled in Maidenhead, near London.

They had three children, Nicholas, Barbara, and Robin.

In 1971, Winton retired in order to spend more time with his family.

And then one day a famous journalist discovered his story.

>> I was standing in my office, and the phone rang, and it was a friend of mine who was a newspaper editor, and she told me that a man called Nicholas Winton... ♪ ...had been up in the loft decluttering, the way we do... ♪ ...with his wife, and they'd come across a briefcase.

♪ ♪ And his wife had said, "What's that?"

And he'd said, "Oh," and opened it up and found there papers that look like this.

And she said, "What are they?"

And he said, "Oh, well, that was something that happened just before the war."

And what my friend told me is that his wife looked at these documents and photographs and said, "But these will be very, very precious.

These will be very valuable for the children who were saved."

>> Grete showed her husband's album to her friend Elizabeth, a historian married to Robert Maxwell, the British press magnate.

Maxwell himself was a Jew from Czechoslovakia and a survivor of the Holocaust.

He had the story published in The Sunday Mirror, and at the BBC a special program was produced in the greatest secrecy.

>> I was in the kitchen, probably cooking lunch, and the phone went.

And the person said, "This is Esther Rantzen."

Now, Esther Rantzen was a very famous, is a very famous person, and at that time she had a regular program.

>> A very popular program -- we used to have 15, 18, 20 million viewers.

>> But when she said, "This is Esther Rantzen," I said, "Oh, yes."

And I replied, "Yes, I am the Queen of England," because I was convinced it was one of my friends just being funny.

But this lady said, "I am Esther Rantzen.

What was your name before you were married?"

And I said, "Milena Fleischmann."

And she said, "Well, I have in my hand a scrapbook, a scrapbook that belongs to a man called Nicholas Winton.

And he is the man who saved 669 children, brought them to England.

And you and your sister are two of the children."

>> A clever, little ruse was in the making.

On the evening of the 28th of February 1988, Nicholas Winton was invited to attend a BBC show, but he was told little of what it was to be about.

♪ ♪ [ Cheers and applause ] >> So, he was sitting between these two women and watching this program, having no idea who they were.

They knew who he was.

And then Esther Rantzen, the presenter, went through the scrapbook, pointing out different pieces, and then came to the list at the back.

>> This is his scrapbook.

There are all kinds of fascinating pictures in it.

Perhaps you can see this is a picture of Nicholas Winton himself with one of the children he rescued.

And here on the opposite page, you can see the identification card of one of the little boys whose name is Hans Heinrich Feige.

>> It was a Sunday evening, and a friend phoned, and Jane said, "John, were you watching 'That's Life'?"

I said, "No, Jane, I wasn't.

Just having a quiet evening in.

Why do you ask?"

And Jane said, "Well, you were on it."

>> And then I remember turning to one of these children, Vera Diamant, now grown up, and identifying her, and then telling her for the first time that she was sitting next to Nicholas Winton.

Vera Gissing is with us here tonight.

Hello, Vera.

And I should tell you that you are actually sitting next to Nicholas Winton.

>> Hello.

[ Applause ] >> It was a shock, a total surprise.

For the first time, Winton came face-to-face with one of the children that he had saved 50 years previously.

>> Thank you.

>> So, I stopped, and I got off my chair, and I walked off the set, and I blew my nose, and I wiped my eyes, and I went back onto the set, and I sat on my chair, and we picked it up from there.

One more story for you -- Milena Fleischmann, she had to escape when she was nine with her little sister because her father was on the Nazis' wanted list.

Milena is on Nicholas' list -- you see her there -- but she is now Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines.

And there she is.

Milena, I believe you still have the name tag you wore around your neck when you arrived as a little girl at Liverpool -- >> Yes, I have.

I wore this around my neck.

And this is the actual pass that we were given to come to England.

And I'm another of the children that you saved.

[ Applause ] And he was completely taken back.

He had absolutely no idea this was going to happen.

And so, there we were, 40 years later, finding ourselves sitting next to Nicholas Winton, the man who saved our life.

>> The audience that evening was transported.

Esther Rantzen, the journalist and producer, then decided to find other children that Winton had saved.

>> Well, now, if any other of Mr. Winton's children would like to contact either us by phone or letter or The Sunday Mirror, please do so.

The Sunday Mirror has phone lines open now.

>> So, I picked up the phone, dialed the number.

Thought the man on the moon might answer it.

And the voice at the other end said, "Esther Rantzen speaking.

How can I help you?"

>> Of course that week we got phone calls.

We got letters.

And so we invited Nicky Winton back.

[ Cheers and applause ] You're very kind.

Thank you very much, indeed.

We asked as many as possible of these grown-up children to get in touch with us so they'd have the chance to thank Mr. Winton personally.

Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?

If so, could you stand up, please?

♪ ♪ ♪ >> With this reunion, Nicholas Winton's family had just grown by several hundred children.

Orphaned, they had found a father.

[ Applause ] ♪ ♪ >> Well, it's marvelous to be reunited with the children.

I mean, luckily, I'm very friendly with a great number of them.

And I'm friendly with a great number of their children and their children's children.

So, it's given me kind of a second life.

♪ ♪ >> To celebrate the 100th birthday of their rescuer, those who today call themselves the Children of Winton chartered a train in Prague.

They headed towards London and once more undertook the journey to life and to freedom.

It was an extraordinary commemoration.

♪ ♪ >> Nicholas Winton definitely saved my life.

I have no doubt at all that I would not have survived the Holocaust if I'd been in Prague.

So, I've always felt that about him.

And I felt this personal feeling for him that I owe my life, my very existence to him.

♪ >> On the platform of Liverpool Street Station, a little wraith, a ghost of the 250 children who disappeared on the last train, came to welcome Milena, Alice, Eva, and all the other children to pay one last homage to Nicholas Winton.

>> We do regard Nicholas almost as our father.

My daughter named one of her children Nicholas.

So, in the family, I've got a grandson called Nicholas and a great-grandson called Winton.

>> Father to 669 children, grandfather and great-grandfather to more than 6,000 grandchildren, and knighted by the queen, Sir Nicholas Winton died at the age of 106.

>> I work on the motto that if something's not impossible, there must be a way of doing it.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪