Zyta Eliahu - February 3, 2008
Hearing of Nicholas Winton II
You know Winton made up the group.
I beg pardon?
He made up a group. He invented it.
You see, Winton--as you probably know--he visited Czechoslovakia in '38 and he saw what was happening to the Jewish children there and he made up a lot of groups. I mean, there were, there were all the time--I don't know the total number of groups but he took care so the children could come into Britain. He took care to get the fifty pound guaranty for each child and to get a lot of people together to do all this and...
But he couldn't get the help from the British government so he just made it up...
But you know, the British government in '38--the Jews in Europe wanted to, to get away whether it was England or America and nobody wanted to take them so in the end the parents said, "Well, at least save our children." And then the British government did pass a law that they would take in as many children as would come and it was this that he could work. But of course, it moved slowly so he sometimes had to do all kinds of things to make it go...
He was very resourceful.
He was very res...well, look he had the covering that the government agreed to take in the children. The rest he was very resourceful in. And he had to find families to take the children. The bigger children--fourteen years old--were sent to boarding schools or hostels or even I think they started to work because at that time in England you could start to work at the age of fourteen. The ones that--the girls that were sixteen many of them were taken into domestic help. But the small children--I was eight--they had to be found homes and there were not enough Jewish homes to take them in so there were a lot of non-Jewish homes that took them. There were Quakers who also helped.
Well, I haven't done a lot of interviews but none of them were taken into Jewish homes--the ones that I've talked to.
Yes, I know.
Um...
And there were a lot of Jewish families especially in London.
Let's think about--when you think about Nicholas Winton and Bill Barazetti...
Yes.
...what do you think about them?
I think they were two wonderful people and I was privileged to meet both of them. I met Winton a number of times.
In England or when he...
I also met him in England and I met him here because he came here in 2005 was the last time he came here and we--all the Czech Kinder were invited to come to the I think it was the Dan Ho...one of the Dan hotels in Tel Aviv. And I have--took a picture with him England, I took a picture with him here. And we went to see the new wing in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem. Now the in...there's another interesting thing, when we met with him this time in '05 in Tel Aviv, I think the Federman, who is the sort of the owners--owner of the Dan chain, his wife--what was really heartbreaking for Winton was that the last two hundred children that were supposed to leave on the 2nd or 3rd of September never left because war broke out on the 1st of September and they think that all the children were lost and sent to the concentration camps...
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