As she dedicates herself to one last campaign, Esther Rantzen reflects on her career on screen – and the power of TV to change lives for ever
I VIVIDLY REMEMBER THE moment the scrapbook chronicling Nicholas Winton’s incredible work, saving 669 children from the Holocaust, arrived in the That’s Life! production office. He had kept very quiet about his extraordinary rescue operation – bringing children on trains from Prague to Britain on the brink of the Second World War – for almost 50 years, not even discussing it with his beloved wife until they found the scrapbook while decluttering their loft. She realised how crucial the documents would be to those children, so they contacted That’s Life! to help trace them.
Turning the pages of the album, seeing photographs of the children Nicky (as I came to call him) had saved and their names – including, alas, the children who didn’t survive because they had been taken off the last train when war was declared in 1939 – was incredibly poignant.
Nicky had seen the terrible living conditions of the refugees, most of them Jewish, while on holiday in Prague. Realising it would only be a matter of time before the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, he organised – with a tiny team including his mother – British families to foster children and trains to carry them to safety.
Our first step was to ring Nicky himself, but when I congratulated him on his extraordinary achievement, he just said, bleakly, “Not enough.” I was devastated that he felt he had failed. I wanted to prove to this extraordinary man that every life he had saved was precious. And of course he had saved many, many precious lives. It has been estimated that now 6,000 people owe their very existence to Nicholas Winton. The Jewish children Nicky rescued were almost the only ones in Czechoslovakia to survive the Holocaust.
Katinka Blackford, one of our researchers, began investigating. She found three of the children, now adults, who had no idea how they had been rescued. When we invited Nicky to our studio we didn’t tell him that Vera and Milena would sit either side of him in the audience. It was almost unbearably moving as they turned to him to thank him for their lives. That was the only time in my career when I had to stop recording to wipe away my tears. Afterwards, we were contacted by dozens of viewers who realised for the first time who had saved them from certain death.
In our next episode, I asked all those who owed their lives to him to stand, and Nicky, whom we had seated on the front row, turned to see the whole ground floor of the Television Theatre on their feet.
The first episode aired 36 years ago this month and these moments have been seen millions of times since online. I’ve watched them many times myself, and each time find myself deeply moved. So many of those children grew up to achieve so muc
