In December 1938, a 29-year-old British stockbroker canceled a ski trip and ended up in Prague. With a card table and a typewriter in a hotel room, he started a rescue operation nobody had asked him to start.His name was Nicholas Winton. He had gone to Prague to visit a friend at a refugee organization focused on adults. Nobody was doing anything for the children. Nicholas had been in the city less than a week when he decided to change that.Jewish families knew what was coming. Germany had invaded that fall and the rest of the country was next. Adults had little realistic chance of escaping. But children, if someone could find British homes and organize the paperwork, might still make it. Parents lined up at his hotel carrying slips of paper with their children's names and birthdays. One father pressed a folded note into his hand and could not finish a sentence.Nicholas returned to London at Christmas with a list of names and no plan. A program called the Kindertransport was already moving Jewish children from Germany and Austria into British homes, but nothing covered Czechoslovakia. So he built the equivalent from his mother's dining room, writing to the government for permits, finding families willing to take a child, and arranging trains from Prague to the Channel, boats across the water, and trains into London.Eight trains ran between March and August of 1939. Each child wore a number matching one held by a waiting British family. Six hundred and sixty-nine children made it through. Every one had a page in a black leather scrapbook, with their photograph, name, and birthday written in pencil.A ninth train was scheduled for September 1, 1939, carrying 250 more. That morning, Germany invaded Poland and every border in Europe slammed shut. The ninth train never left Prague. Nicholas received the news in London and went quiet.He never spoke of it again. Not to friends, not to colleagues, not to the woman he married after the war, not to his children. He served in the Royal Air Force, survived, and went back to work. The scrapbook went into a box. The box went to the attic.Fifty years passed.In the late 1980s, Nicholas's wife found that box while cleaning the attic. Inside was the scrapbook, 669 pages, each with a child's face and a name in pencil. She brought it downstairs and asked her husband to explain. It was the first time he had told the story in fifty years.She brought the scrapbook to a researcher in wartime rescue history, who contacted the BBC. The producers of That's Life, hosted by Esther Rantzen, decided the country needed to hear this. Nicholas agreed to appear, but only if he could sit anonymously in the studio audience. He would not sit on stage.What he did not know was that the producers had tracked down the people from his scrapbook. The children from those eight trains were in their fifties and sixties by 1988. Dozens of them were in the studio that night.The host told his story on camera and showed the scrapbook. She introduced Nicholas, sitting in the front row, to the woman beside him. One of the 669. She asked if anyone else owed their life to Nicholas Winton. One by one, almost the entire studio audience rose. Every person standing had been a child with a number on their coat, and every one of them owed everything to the man in the front row who had spent fifty years believing he had not done enough.Nicholas Winton was knighted in 2003. He lived to be 106. The 669 children he rescued, and their descendants, number in the thousands.Tales from the Glovebox tells true stories of real people who did extraordinary things, delivered as voiceover narration over late-night driving footage. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode.

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