Dotted throughout Poland,
there were hundreds, and I mean hundreds,
of extermination camps.
And these were small camps,
where the trains that brought the prisoners,
you lasted about a month.
And 15,000 Czech and Slovak children
died in concentration camps.
I was born in Prague,
but as a family, we lived in a small village.
My own mother died when I was three years old,
and eventually my father remarried
and my stepmother was a doctor.
But she was always my mother,
and that's where we lived.
That was in 1937.
Well, of course, by 1939,
I personally had no idea what was going on in Europe,
but Hitler had already occupied Austria,
there'd already been this dreadful Munich Agreement,
which Chamberlain attended,
where they finally,
Hitler said that he wanted to occupy
certain parts of the Czech Republic
on the border of Germany.
And he basically promised
that if they could occupy that area of the country,
he'd leave the rest alone.
So Chamberlain came back and said,
'Great, there's not going to be a war.
You know, we've made agreement.'
But, of course, that was all a lie,
because on the 14th of March, 1939,
the Nazis occupied the rest of the country.
[Producer, Erin] Do you have any memory of that?
I have absolutely no memory of that at all.
What I do know, that my father was involved
with a very famous German author called Thomas Mann.
Back in the 30s,
Thomas Mann had written some very unpleasant
anti-Nazi articles and books,
and he was expelled from Germany.
So in 1939, these two men came to see my father,
saying, "By tomorrow, Prague will be occupied.
Your name is high on the list to be arrested by the Gestapo,
and we suggest that you leave."
I just know he disappeared.
We didn't know...
Our parents never talked about this.
My mother, you know, didn't discuss this with us.
I was a nine year old.
My sister was three.
And then, in May that year,
she told us that we were going to go to England.
There'd already been a Kindertransport in 1938,
when 10,000 Austrian and German children
had been brought to England,
and that was the Kindertransport.
But in 1939 is when the Germans started, you know,
when the occupation began,
and the Czech Jewish families
were beginning to realise how dangerous life
was going to be, and put their children on the train.
On the 31st of July,
I was taken with my sister to the railway station,
and my grandfather came with us,
and it was there that he gave me my autograph book,
in which he sent a message, wrote a message,
and in the message, he said,
"Remember to stay faithful to the country you're leaving;
to your grandfather, to your parents,
who love you very much."
And we were then put on the train.
This is the label I actually wore around my neck.
And it's got British Committee Child Transport,
with Fleischmann, Milena.
And my number was 641.
And my sister's was 639.
I can't honestly remember, you know, being on the train,
travelling on that train,
except I was with my sister, and with us was also
my two-and-a-half-year-old little cousin
that was also travelling, called Helen,
whose father had also escaped
and he was already in England.
He'd joined the Czech Air Force.
So he was waiting for her
when she got to England.
We travelled to Holland.
En route, although the train stopped,
we couldn't get out to buy any food.
We had to have everything with us.
But we got to Holland,
and Holland at that point was still free,
and we were met at the station,
and I know by, you know,
Dutch people who were expecting this train
with these children,
given, I was told, hot chocolate to drink,
I was told bananas.
My sister said she was sick,
but she can't possibly remember because she was three.
But then we were put on this huge ship.
Now, none of us had ever seen the sea.
Czechoslovakia is right in the centre of Europe,
and the biggest thing we saw would be lakes.
However, we travelled with the ship to Harwich,
where there was another train waiting for us
to take us to Liverpool Street Station.
And there were the various foster parents
waiting to collect the children;
these parents that had been found
by this man called Nicholas Winton.
We were met by a couple called,
well, only he came,
we got to know him eventually as Daddy Ratcliffe,
he was called, Roland Ratcliffe.
and he lived in Ashton-under-Lyne,
a small town near Manchester.
And Daddy Ratcliffe was the secretary
of the local Labor Party.
And he took us on the train to live with them.
And we went to live in 72 Alexandra Street.
And this was a two-up, two-down terraced house,
two bedrooms, bath in the kitchen,
low in the yard, a front room.
And we had come from Prague, from a very modern apartment.
But from what I know, and from what I remember,
we didn't seem to mind.
And the Ratcliffes had a daughter,
a 16-year-old daughter called Mary.
And because they didn't want to separate us,
because a lot of the children who came,
the siblings were separated from each other,
they sent Mary to live with her grandmother,
so they could have both of us in the bedroom.
And they were extremely kind to us.
And as opposed to people talking about English food,
we had absolutely no problem.
Mummy Ratcliffe was a very good cook.
And, you know, you remember things through remembering food.
And I remember things like plum pie,
and Yorkshire pudding with syrup on it.
And I went to the local school, Mossley Road Council School.
I've got a report somewhere,
and I must have been speaking English very quickly.
And from photographs of the time, we look very happy.
[Erin] At what point did you begin to understand
what had happened to you?
All the time, when we were small,
our parents never talked about it.
Now, we knew the war was on,
but, of course, nobody knew,
well, a few people, we gather now,
did know what was going on with concentration camps.
But certainly the general public didn't.
We didn't.
We didn't know that in 1942,
when The Final Solution that was known,
that was organised,
when all the Jewish population was being rounded up
and sent to either Terezin,
or, in my case, in our case,
my cousins and my grandparents
were sent directly to an extermination camp,
of which there were many that people don't realise.
People know the name of Auschwitz and Belsen,
but dotted throughout Poland,
there were hundreds, and I mean hundreds,
of extermination camps.
And these were small camps,
where the trains that brought the prisoners,
you lasted about a month,
and you were still immediately murdered in the gas chambers.
And my cousins, who were the same ages,
who would've been, at the time,
15 and 12,
very sadly, they, in 1942, with their parents,
were taken away, and to a concentration camp.
And from the documents,
they lasted just a month before they were killed there.
So most of my relations actually died in the camps.
Although I came out on the last train,
there was another train due to leave.
And this train was full of over 200 children,
and it was due to leave on the 1st of September.
And 1st of September, 1939,
is when the Germans invaded Poland.
War started, and that train never left.
And 15,000 Czech and Slovak children
died in concentration camps.
And from that train, as far as we know,
we had news of about four children that had survived,
but all the others didn't.
And, of course, we wouldn't have,
if my mother hadn't been brave enough
to put us on that train.
[Erin] Can you discuss the first time
that you were told about the man who had rescued you
all those years ago.
The first time was when I got a phone call
at home in the kitchen,
in 19-, what would it be?
'58, '68, '78,
'88?
And this woman said, "This is Esther Rantzen."
And I thought somebody was pulling my leg.
And I just said, "I'm the Queen of England."
I literally answered it that way.
And she said, "No, what was your name
before you were Grenfell-Baines?"
And I said, "It was Fleischmann."
She said, "Well, I have a list in my hand,
and we found your name on there,
and the list comes from a scrapbook
which belongs to a man called Nicholas Winton.
And we're going to invite Mr. Winton
to the television studio,
and we'd like you to come down to meet him.
We're inviting a few of you."
I said, "Yes, certainly."
But I still had no idea really what she was saying,
I hadn't taken it in.
And when I got to London and we got to the studio,
she said, "Now we're going to ask this gentleman to come in.
We don't want you to tell him who you are.
This is to surprise him.
But he's the man who organised the trains
that you travelled on when you came to England."
We were sitting on the front row
and there was an empty chair next to us,
and she sat Nicky down there.
And the programme started,
and she had this scrapbook with her,
and she was saying, "Now, Mr. Winton,
these are the pictures of some of the children
that you brought to England,
and here is the list of names.
And next to you," now, it was on his left,
"is a woman called Vera."
She was called Vera Gissing.
And Vera flung her arms around him and said,
"Thank you for saving my life."
And I was sitting on his right-hand side.
And, of course, and then she introduced me to him,
and I happened to have,
and I was able to tell him that not only I was saved,
that my mother was saved.
And when Esther Rantzen said,
"Those of you who came on the train, would you stand up?"
The entire studio stood up.
And there you saw him slightly wiping his eyes.
He wasn't an emotional man, really, at all.
If you today go down any street in the Czech Republic
and you tell them that you're a Winton child,
every person in the country knows his name.
[Erin] When you met him, how did you feel?
Well, how do you feel
when you meet a man who saves your life?
And, of course,
he became almost a surrogate father, uncle, grandfather,
to hundreds of these children, who, by now,
had been married and had got families.
As he said, by then, he had a family of over 5,000 children.
One of us was living in Tel Aviv,
and his name was Hugo Marom.
And Hugo was visiting Nicky, and he said,
"You know, Nicky, you're famous,
people know about us.
But the heroes of all our stories were really the parents
who were brave enough to put the children on the trains,
because most of them probably knew
they would never see them again.
And we should have a memorial to those parents."
And Nicky said, "And not before time."
[Erin] I have time for one more question,
and it's quite a big one.
What would you most want people to understand
about the events of the Holocaust,
and take from hearing your story and stories like yours?
Well, first of all, I think it needs to be repeated.
I think the film needs to be shown in schools.
And I make a point of this, personally,
and I know there are a few of us who are still alive,
who go to schools, who talk to children.
Auschwitz should be visited.
And I do know that high schools now
do have Holocaust education
and take young people
to see what happens
when something dreadfully goes wrong,
and a country, and certain people,
take law into their own hands.
What happened in those days must never again be repeated,
and it must never ever be forgotten.