It was 2008 and my family and I were at the premiere of the film The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton.
The documentary is about the young English stockbroker who, between March and August 1939, rescued 669 refugee children, mostly Jewish, whose families had fled persecution by Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia.
The director, Matej Minac, had previously spent a day interviewing my mother, Liesl Silverstone (née Fischmann), my brother Rob, and myself – because my mother was one of the 669 children Sir Nicholas Winton had saved.
She’d told him about her journey from Prague to London and her early months in the UK – and now, watching the film with my mum was incredibly moving, particularly the scenes where the children depart from the station, leaving their families behind.
After the screening was over, Nicholas Winton was introduced by journalist and presenter Esther Rantzen, to great acclaim.
As Nicholas stepped out on stage, I felt hugely indebted to him.
Rantzen then asked for all the Kindertransport people present to stand. Around 20 – including my mother – stood up, most of them now elderly, to a tremendous round of applause.
The event was exactly like the 1988 program, That’s Life, where Winton met the children he saved during the Holocaust.
Rantzen then asked all the people who wouldn’t have been there without Winton to stand. Half of us in the audience got to our feet.
It was incredibly moving for me to share that experience with my mother, brother, children and grandchildren, who were all there with me.
I realised then that Nicholas Winton had saved us all. I wouldn’t be here had it not been for him. That image of half the room – including my family – standing is one I will never forget.
My mother, Liesl, was born in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, in 1927 to an upper-middle class Jewish family. Her father and grandfather had established a large glass factory in and around that town.
While her mother, Friedl, came from a rural Jewish background, my mum grew up in a very bourgeois lifestyle. It seems she had a happy childhood together with her brother Heinz.
When the Germans invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, my mother’s parents decided to move to Prague, where the kids were enrolled in a school and my grandfather retrained as a watchmaker following their relocation.
My grandparents had numerous appointments with embassies seeking visas, but any attempts to secure visas out of Czechoslovakia for the whole family were unsuccessful – and once war was declared, their focus shifted to surviving as a family unit.
This followed the complete annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, when Czech Jews were subject to growing restrictions on what they could do, with whom they could associate and where they could live.
Living conditions in Prague became increasingly bad – but, until their forced arrival at Terezin, a concentration camp 30 miles north of Prague, in 1942, my grandparents had no idea what awaited them.
For now, they just knew they had to get the children out if they possibly could – and this is how my grandparents came across Nicholas Winton.
I have no idea how they actually met him, but it was most likely through word of mouth via the Jewish community in Prague.
The Kindertransport scheme covered the evacuation of 10,000 child refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe to Britain. Nicholas’ focus was on saving Jewish children in Czechoslovakia.