Against racial insanity (Winton, Schindler) – Praha a Svitavy

Fact of the Czech figure „Racial genocide in occupied Czech lands”

Part of the „The Holocaust” topic

 In the passageway of the Main Station in Prague is situated the Farewell Monument, erected in 2017. The monument takes the form of a replica of the rear door of a departing train from 1939, with casts of children’s hands in a gesture of farewell. Subsequently, on the first platform, visitors are faced with a sculpture of three figures created by sculptor Flora Kent in 2009. The sculpture portrays a young man wearing glasses, two children and a suitcase. Both monuments serve to commemorate a great personality and a great deed.

In consequence of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia was obliged to relinquish a considerable portion of its territory. Tens of thousands of Czechoslovak citizens who were unwilling to remain in Hitler’s state fled the territories that had been ceded. Among the refugees were political opponents of Nazism and Jews. The wounded Czechoslovakia was unable to provide for them adequately, and many survived in deplorable circumstances. Furthermore, following Munich, the political elite began to prioritise collaboration with Hitler. They enacted anti-Semitic legislation, which was passed in the spring of 1939 in the weeks following the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia.

The alarming circumstances faced by refugees led to the intervention of British citizen, bank clerk and stockbroker Nicolas Winton (1909-2015). Concerned about the situation in the wake of the Nazi pogroms in November, Winton arrived in Prague in December 1938. He believed that, at the very least, the children should have been saved.

With a group of friends, he formulated a strategy and raise funds to save them. He arranged for the children to be adopted by foster families in the UK. As a result of these efforts, four trains of predominantly Jewish children were successfully dispatched from Prague’s principal railway station.  However, on 1 September 1939, the onset of German military aggression against Poland resulted in the fifth and final train being halted in Prague. Nevertheless, 669 children were transported to the UK to a new life. At the time, Winton was unaware of it, but he saved all these children from the horrors of the Shoah.