Historical records matching Grete Winton
view all
Immediate Family
-
-
daughter -
son -
Privatechild -
father
-
mother -
brother -
sister
About Grete Winton
The Last Rescuer
In 1989, Danish-born Greta Winton, who died 1999, came across an old leather briefcase in an attic. It contained lists of children and letters from their parents, dating back 50 years. She had stumbled on a story about her husband, Nicholas, that was as gripping as anything Hollywood ever produced - one, which for all that time he had concealed better than any secret love.
The lists were the only remaining record of 669 children whom Nicholas Winton single-handedly spirited out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 to safety in Britain. Most of the surviving children never even knew who their rescuer was until recently.
As Winton's son, Nick, discovered, his father had a trunk full of documents from 1938 and 1939, but the family wasn't sure what to with them until Dr. Betty Maxwell, (the wife of the late news magnate Robert Maxwell) heard the story and wrote an article about the incredible tale Winton had modestly concealed for 50 years.
British writer Vera Gissing, one of the rescued children, wrote a memoir "Pearls of Childhood," which helped further publicize Winton's deeds. "He is almost an adopted parent for us all, because nearly all of us lost our parents in the Holocaust," she said.
Winton was finally reunited with hundreds of the children - including British Labor peer Lord "Alf" Dubs and film director (of "The French Lieutenant's Woman") Karel Reisz, who died last November - at an emotional gathering for 5,000 descendants of the "Winton children."
Lord Dubs was only seven when he got out of Prague and found out from a television program a few years ago that Winton had saved him. "He is Britain's last living rescuer," said Dubs. Gissing said: "He saved most of the Czech Jewish children of my generation. I owe him my life and those of my children and their children." Reisz was shocked when he found out one man was behind the rescues: "He [let the world believe the Red Cross had organized it."
view all
Grete Winton's Timeline
| 1919 |
1919
|
Denmark
|
|
| 1953 |
October 23, 1953
|
Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom
|
|
| 1955 |
1955
|
||
| 1999 |
1999
Age 80
|
England, United Kingdom
|