Sir Nicholas Winton would be 'deeply disturbed' by the war in Ukraine and 'unhappy' with language about refugees

Sir Nicholas Winton would have been ‘deeply disturbed’ by the war in Ukraine and ‘unhappy’ about some of the language used today regarding refugees, his son has said.

Ten years on from Sir Nicholas’ death on July 1, 2015 aged 106, Nick Winton said his father would have noticed the ‘echoes’ with the uncertain period leading up to the Second World War.

Sir Nicholas, a stockbroker from Maidenhead, is celebrated for helping rescue hundreds of mostly Jewish children from a Czechoslovakia on the brink of Nazi invasion in 1939.

Discussing similarities between that time and the war in Ukraine, Mr Winton told the Advertiser:

“He [Sir Nicholas] would have been really deeply disturbed by the situation and rather, I think, unhappy about how it’s working out.”

He added: “He would of, I think, felt that the warning signs have been flashing red for a long time.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin sparked a full-scale war when he ordered his forces to invade Ukraine in 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014. Moscow’s grinding campaign has since caused millions of people to be displaced.

Talk of an uneasy peace deal – that could involve Ukraine surrendering territory – remains just that.

Mr Winton said: “The echoes with some of the rhetoric being used in Ukraine are just uncanny.

“Certainly, my father wasn’t that impressed that the West did so little when Crimea was taken.”

Comparing a potential Ukraine peace deal to the 1938 Munich Agreement, Mr Winton said there was a risk of a repetition.

The Munich Agreement saw allied powers agree to cede Czechoslovakian land to the Nazis in an ill-fated attempt to avoid a wider conflict.  

He said: “I’m not a war monger and certainly Pa wasn’t, I think if anything he was a pacifist.

“But when the bully in the playground starts throwing their weight around, it needs everybody to stand up and say, ‘you can’t behave like that’.”

Sir Nicholas helped organise the rescue of 669 mainly Jewish children from Prague on Kindertransport trains. Many had been living in desperate conditions in refugee camps.

Mr Winton said: “Pa, he just liked people, he thought he was saving children - not Jewish children or any particular group – it was lives that mattered to him.”

Asked whether Sir Nicholas would have felt ‘unhappy’ by some of the language used today discussing refugees, Mr Winton replied ‘yes’.

He added: “Sometimes, sort of as a joke, when I talk about pa, I say ‘not many people know he was colourblind – he was also blind to religion and race’.

“I know it’s kind of a cute way of saying it, but for him, we were all people and we had more in common than we had differences.”

Sir Nicholas’ wartime mission depicted in the 2023 film One Life was though, just a snapshot of his life.

His experience raising his son Robin, who lived with Down Syndrome and died at a young age in the 1960s, led Sir Nicholas to a decades-long support for Maidenhead Mencap Society.

He campaigned for new facilities for a Maidenhead care home and also spoke of how joining Rotary Club was ‘one of the best things he’d ever done’.

Mr Winton said Sir Nicholas would have thought it ‘bizarre that anyone would want to celebrate his life’, but asked what he would hope people could learn from his father’s life, added:

“I think it would be, it’s so rewarding to be involved in helping your friend, your community, people.

“You are connected to each other because we all share the same space and its so much more satisfying if you help make it a nicer place.”