Sir Nicholas Winton’s daughter Barbara dies, aged 69

Tributes have been paid to Sir Nicholas Winton’s daughter Barbara after news was announced this week that she had died.

Barbara Winton was the biographer for her famous father, who rescued hundreds of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before the war in 1939 and was heralded as a “fearless campaigner in her own right” by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR).

Nicholas Winton was a young investment banker when, over Christmas 1938, he went to see what help he could offer in Prague, rather than go skiing as planned. Over the next nine months he organised the evacuation of 669 children, most Jewish, in an operation later known as the Kindertransport.

Winton found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain, but never spoke about his wartime exploits thereafter, until they were revealed in 1988 by TV presenter Esther Rantzen in a now-famous episode of That’s Life.

Barbara, who was most recently outspoken in her disgust at the British Government’s policy of sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda, described herself as “supporting today’s refugees while talking about yesterday’s”.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, AJR said Barbara had continued her father’s legacy by contributing to events including by launching the Sir Nicholas Winton website, an online archive chronicling his remarkable life.

“It was with great sadness that we heard of Barbara Winton’s passing,” AJR said, adding that she was “a tireless advocate for the plight of modern-day refugees and a fearless campaigner for the oppressed and displaced… While she helped to spread awareness of her father’s endeavours, she was, in her own right, a principled voice of reason unafraid to speak truth to power.”

Nicknamed ‘the British Schindler,’ Sir Nicholas died in 2015, at the age of 106. He is due to be played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in a major film biopic called ‘One Life’ to be released next year.

In 2016, a year after Jewish News successfully championed a Royal Mail stamp to honour Sir Nicholas, Barbara addressed the UN Holocaust Memorial Day in New York. A year later, at the 2017 Limmud festival, she talked to British Jews about the impact and effect of her father’s heroic work.

In 2019, she took part in a panel discussion to mark the first anniversary of the opening of the Holocaust Education and Learning Centre at the University of Huddersfield, and a year later, together with the son of fellow wartime humanitarian Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, she opened a new exhibit on the Kindertransport at the Imperial War Museum in London.

More recently, she fully supported the British Jewish community’s efforts to house Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion, hailing the “terrific initiative… using the 1939 Kindertransport as a precedent”.