68 | SEPTEMBER 29 • 2022 

OBITUARIES
OF BLESSED MEMORY

B

arbara 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 cam-
paigner 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. Over the next nine 
months, he organized the evac-
uation 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 present-
er Esther Rantzen in a now-fa-
mous episode of That’s Life.
Barbara, who was most 
recently outspoken in her dis-
gust 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, AJR said 
Barbara had continued her 
father’s legacy 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 cam-
paigner for the oppressed and 
displaced… While she helped to 
spread awareness of her father’s 
endeavors, she was, in her own 
right, a principled voice of rea-
son unafraid to speak truth to 
power.
”
Nicknamed “the British 
Schindler,
” Sir Nicholas died in 
2015, at age 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, 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.
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.
” 

Sir Nicholas Winton’s 
Daughter Barbara 
Dies, Aged 69

ADAM DECKER JEWISH NEWS, UK

Barbara 
Winton

