THE POWER OF GOOD - NICHOLAS WINTON

In the year 1939, during the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, British businessman Nicholas Winton saved the lives of 669 children, most of them Jewish. Disguised as groups of school-children, he got them across the border in trains and transported them all the way through Germany to his safe home Great Britain. For decades, Winton kept his brave rescue operation secret – he did not even tell his wife about it. Only when he met a hundred of the children he saved again in 1988, the story got known in public. The award-winning documentary portrays Winton, who nowadays is over 90 years old, and describes the background of his rescue operation, which back home earned him the nickname “British Schindler”. One learns more about the meticulous preparations, including the forgery of documents, collecting money, and finding British foster families for more than 600 children within a very short time-span. Apart from Nicholas Winton and some of the saved children themselves, Holocaust-experts such as Simon Wiesenthal, Yehuda Bauer, and Elisabeth Maxwell, as well as the former Czech head of state Vaclav Havel get a chance to speak. Nicholas Winton was guest of goEast 2001.