The action hero in my wallet

OPINION: For the past seven years, whenever I have tried to wrestle a stamp or a library card or a drycleaning stub out of my overcrowded wallet, a yellowing and much- folded newspaper cutting has fallen to the floor.

Last week, I opened a daily newspaper and saw the same face that looks out at me every day from the cutting.

I haven't seen another image of this man for the past seven years, and I doubt he'll get any further media attention until he dies - which is unlikely to be long, because Sir Nicholas Winton has just turned 100.

In 1938, when he was 29, a friend suggested he cancel their annual skiing holiday and instead go to Czechoslovakia to visit Jewish refugee camps. What he saw there horrified him.

The Kindertransport (children's transports) had already begun in Germany and Austria, but nothing was being done to help Czechoslovakian children escape the impending invasion. Sir Nicholas asked his stock- broking firm for time off to organise the transports himself.

His boss, J Geoffrey Hart, wrote this in reply: "I have returned today to the city after a nice holiday at my new villa in the south of France. I would sooner you were taking a rest here than doing heroic work with thousands of poor devils who are suffering through no fault of their own."

Sir Nicholas returned to London, but spent all his free time fundraising and trying to find homes for the children. Of the many countries he wrote to, only Britain and Sweden agreed to accept children. (This attitude to Jewish refugees was typical: only 1100 Jews managed to settle in New Zealand between 1931 and 1939, thanks to a 1931 law banning "aliens from Europe" - in other words, anyone who wasn't British.)

Sir Nicholas and his small team of helpers became so desperate to get the children to safety that they began faking passports. Eventually, eight trains carrying 669 children successfully made it to London. A ninth train was about to leave Prague when war was declared: the 250 children aboard were probably killed soon afterwards.

It is impossible now to imagine how those parents must have felt to be sending their sons and daughters into an unknown future. One of the children was Eva Hayman, who eventually emigrated from Britain to New Zealand. Her mother's last words to her, delivered on the platform of Wilson Station in Prague, were that she would send Eva her love "by the moon and the stars".

Sir Nicholas does not believe he is a hero. This is the sort of thing people say all the time now, when they're lauded for the most trivial of accomplishments, and what it usually means is that they want to be considered modest as well as heroic.

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But Sir Nicholas meant it. His wife didn't realise what he'd done until, 40 years into their marriage, she discovered a scrapbook in the attic containing photos of all the rescued children.

Shortly after Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution" in 1989, I visited a small museum in the Jewish ghetto in Prague. These rooms had been used as a school by children living in the ghetto, and many of their drawings had been preserved. Some recalled the past (butterflies, flowers, a family sitting down to a large dinner at a kitchen table) and some recorded the present (barracks, soldiers with guns and dogs, a stick figure being hanged from a gallows).

Below each drawing was the child's name, date of birth, and the mysterious word "Oswiecim". I later discovered this meant the children had all been sent to Auschwitz (or Oswiecim in Polish). These were the children Sir Nicholas could not save.

I have always been haunted by the memory of those drawings. The reason I keep my newspaper cutting is not because it offers the consoling thought that some children escaped the fate of the children from the Jewish ghetto, but because it contains the far more urgent message that compassion is nothing without action.

As Sir Nicholas wrote in a letter in 1939: "There is a difference between passive goodness and active goodness. The latter is, in my opinion, the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering.

"It entails going out, finding and helping those who are suffering and in danger, and not merely in leading an exemplary life, in a purely passive way of doing no wrong."

- © Fairfax NZ News

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