If a hundred years from now only one name is remembered among those who competed in Berlin, it will surely be that of Jesse Owens.
Owens won the 100-meter sprint, the long jump, the 200-meter sprint, and the 4 x 100 sprint relay. He became the first American to claim four gold medals in a single Olympiad. In the process, he set or equaled three world records.
Legend has it that Hitler snubbed Owens. That’s not quite true: Hitler didn’t shake Owens’s hand, but contemporaneous accounts show (and Owens himself confirmed) that the American athlete waved at Hitler and Hitler waved back. Still, this did not mean the führer suddenly admired Owens or other African American athletes. According to fellow Nazi Albert Speer, Hitler was “highly annoyed” by Owens’s victories and said that blacks should never be allowed to compete in the Olympics again. Jeremy Schaap, in his account of Owens’s performance at the 1936 games, notes that the American athlete “stood up to [the Nazis] at their own Olympics, refuting their venomous theories with his awesome deeds.”
A side story of Owens’s Berlin experience was the friendship he made with a German competitor named Luz Long. A decent man by any measure, Long exhibited no racial animosity and even offered tips to Owens that the American found helpful during the games. Of Long, Owens would later tell an interviewer: “It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler.… You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II.”
Snubbed by FDR
Back home, ticker-tape parades feted Owens in New York City and Cleveland. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came out to cheer him. Letters, phone calls, and telegrams streamed in from around the world to congratulate him. From one important man, however, no word of recognition ever came. As Owens later put it, “Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send a telegram.”
Franklin Roosevelt, leader of a major political party with deep roots in racism, couldn’t bring himself to utter a word of support, even though he hosted a number of white Olympians at the White House. The snubbing may have been a factor in Owens’s decision to campaign for Republican Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election.
“It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close,” Owens once said about athletic competition. He could have taught FDR a few lessons in character, but the president never gave him the chance. Owens wouldn’t be invited to the White House for almost twenty years—not until Dwight Eisenhower named him “Ambassador of Sports” in 1955.
Life after the Olympics wasn’t always kind to Jesse Owens. When he wanted to earn money from commercial endorsements, athletic officials yanked his amateur status. Then the commercial offers dried up. He was forced to file for bankruptcy. When a dinner was held in his honor at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Owens felt the sting of racial discrimination again: he was forced to take the freight elevator to his own celebration.
But for the last thirty years of his life, until he died in 1980 of lung cancer, he found helping underprivileged teenagers to be even more personally satisfying than his Olympic gold medals. In the 1950s he served on the Illinois Youth Commission and organized the Junior Olympic Games for teenage athletes. The website of the Jesse Owens Trust notes that Owens “was an inspirational speaker, highly sought after to address youth groups, professional organizations, civic meetings, sports banquets, PTAs, church organizations, brotherhood and black history programs, as well as high school and college commencements and ceremonies.”
Ten years after his death, Owens was awarded one of America’s highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal. Presenting the medal to Owens’s widow, President George H.W. Bush recognized her husband’s “humanitarian contributions in the race of life.” Owens was not simply an Olympic hero, Bush said; he was “an American hero every day of his life.”
Lessons from Jesse Owens
To achieve your dreams, exercise determination, dedication, and self-discipline: The son of a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave, Jesse Owens worked multiple jobs to pay his way through college. As a sprinter, he spoke of “a lifetime of training for just ten seconds.” All the training paid off when, at the 1936 Olympics, he won four gold medals as Hitler grumbled about a black man’s being allowed to compete.
Fight “the struggles within yourself”: Owens understood that so much lay outside his control. “The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals,” he said. “The struggles within yourself—the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that’s where it’s at.”
25
Nicholas Winton
The Humblest Hero
The truest hero does not think of himself as one, never advertises himself as such, and does not for fame or fortune perform the acts that make him a hero. Nor does he wait for government to act if he senses an opportunity to fix a problem himself.
On July 27, 2006, in the quiet countryside of Maidenhead, England, my colleague Ben Stafford and I spent several hours with a true hero: Sir Nicholas Winton. His friends called him “Nicky.”
In the fall of 1938, many Europeans were lulled into complacency by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who thought he had pacified Adolf Hitler by handing him a large chunk of Czechoslovakia at Munich in late September. Winston Churchill was among the wise and prescient who believed otherwise. So was Nicholas Winton, then a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker.
Having made many business trips to Germany, Winton was well aware that Jews were being arrested, harassed, and beaten there. The infamous Kristallnacht of November 9–10, 1938—in which Nazi thugs destroyed Jewish synagogues, homes, and businesses while murdering scores of Jews across Germany—laid to rest any doubts about Hitler’s deadly intentions. The führer’s increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism and Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938 spurred a tide of predominantly Jewish refugees. Thousands fled to as-yet-unoccupied Czechoslovakia, with many settling into makeshift refugee camps in appalling conditions.
Winton had planned a year-end ski trip to Switzerland with a friend, but at the last moment the friend convinced him to come to Prague instead because he had “something urgent to show him”—the refugee problem. When Winton visited the freezing camps, what he saw aroused deep feelings of compassion within him: orphans and children whose parents had been arrested, and families desperate to get at least their children out of harm’s way. Jewish parents who were lifetime residents and citizens in the country were also anxious to send their children to safety. They, like Winton, sensed that the Nazis wouldn’t rest until they had taken the rest of the country, and perhaps all of Europe as well. The thought of what could happen to them if the Nazis devoured the rest of Czechoslovakia was enough to inspire this good man to action.
It would have been easy to assume that there was nothing a lone foreigner could do to assist so many trapped families. Winton could have ignored the situation and resumed his vacation in Switzerland, stepping back into his comfortable life. Surely most other people in his shoes would have walked away. But despite the talk of “peace in our time,” Winton knew that these refugees needed help, and quickly.
The next steps he took ultimately saved 669 children from death in Nazi concentration camps.
Words of Wisdom from Nicholas Winton
“Don’t be content in your life just to do no wrong. Be prepared every day to try and do some good.”
Swinging into Action
Getting all the children who sought safety to a country that would accept them seemed an impossible challenge. Back in London, Winton wrote to governments around the world, pleading for an open door, only to be rejected by all (including the United States) but two: Sweden and Great Britain. He assembled a small group of volunteers to assist with the effort. Even his mother pitched i
n.
The London team’s counterpart in Prague was a Brit named Trevor Chadwick. He gathered information from parents who wanted their children out, then forwarded the details to Winton, who used every possible channel in his search for foster homes. Five thousand children were on the list. At no charge, British newspapers published Winton’s advertisements to stir interest and highlight the urgent need for foster parents. When enough homes could be found for a group of children, Winton submitted the necessary paperwork to the Home Office. He assisted Chadwick in organizing the rail and ship transportation needed to get them to Britain.
Winton also took the lead in raising the funds to pay for the operation. The expenses included the 50 British pounds the Home Office required for each child (the equivalent of $3,500 in today’s dollars) to cover any future costs of repatriation. But hopes that the danger would pass and the children could be returned soon evaporated.
Picture the scene at the Prague railway station: Anguished parents loaded their children onto trains and said what would be, for most, their final good-byes. Boys and girls, many younger than five, peered out the windows wondering about their uncertain future. None of the children knew whether they would ever be reunited with their families.
The first twenty of “Winton’s children” left Prague on March 14, 1939. Hitler’s troops overran all of Czechoslovakia the very next day, but the volunteers kept working, sometimes forging documents to slip the children past the Germans. By the time World War II broke out on September 1, the rescue effort had transported 669 children out of the country in eight separate groups.
That day, a ninth batch of 250 more children—the largest group of all—was stuck on the train at the Prague station; the outbreak of war prompted the Nazis to stop all departures. Sadly, none of those children lived to see the Allied victory less than six years later. Pitifully few of the parents did either.
While we celebrate the 669 children Winton saved, Nicky’s conscience was always stung by the 250 who almost made it but didn’t. Hundreds more were on his list waiting for a chance to get out.
Humility
So why did Nicky Winton do it?
It certainly was not for the plaudits it might bring him. He never told anyone about his efforts for a half century. Not until 1988, when his wife stumbled across a musty box of records and a scrapbook while cleaning their attic, did the public learn of Winton’s story. The scrapbook, a memento put together by his volunteers when the operation shut down, was filled with documents and pictures of Czech children.
The year the scrapbook was discovered, a television show seen across Britain, That’s Life, told the Winton story to a large audience and brought Nicky together with many of his “children” for the first time since those horrific days of 1939. For all the intervening decades, the children and the families who took them in knew little more than that some kind soul, some guardian angel, had saved their lives. But for two decades after that show, Nicky was in regular correspondence with, and was often visited by, many of them—a source of joy and comfort, especially after his wife, Grete, passed away in 1999.
Vera Gissing, one of the children Winton saved, put the rescue mission in perspective: “Of the 15,000 Czech Jewish children taken to the camps, only a handful survived. Winton had saved a major part of my generation of Czech Jews.”
Vera’s story is an especially poignant one. She was ten years old when she left Prague on the fifth train on June 30, 1939. Two of her cousins were on the ninth train that never made it to freedom. Her mother died of typhus two days after the liberation of the concentration camp to which she had been sent. Her father was shot in a Nazi death march in December 1944. Vera has no doubt about her own fate had it not been for Nicholas Winton. Like the other “Winton children” who came to know him, Vera reminded him frequently that she owed her very life to him.
So humble was Nicky Winton that others had to tell him, over his objections, just what an uncommon man he was.
Interviews with many of the adult “Winton children” have revealed a deep appreciation not only for the man whose initiative saved them but also for living life to its fullest. Many expressed a lifelong desire to help others as a way of honoring the loved ones who made the painful choice to trust the young stockbroker from Britain. “We understand how precious life is,” Vera told us. “We wanted to give something back to our natural parents so their memory would live on.”
Years after coming to Britain, Vera asked her foster father, “Why did you choose me?” His reply sums up the spirit of the good people who gave homes to the 669: “I knew I could not save the world and I knew I could not stop war from coming, but I knew I could save one human soul.”
“I Thought I Could Help”
I kept returning to the same question: What compelled this man to take on a challenge almost everyone else ignored?
I asked Nicky that very question at our meeting in 2006, the first of many over the next nine years.
In a matter-of-fact fashion, Winton replied, “Because it was the right thing to do and I thought I could help.”
Nicky Winton was a quiet, humble man—a reminder of Aristotle’s “great-souled man.” In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle said that the great-souled person is “the sort to benefit others but is ashamed to receive a benefaction … [and] is disposed to return a benefaction with a greater one.” You never heard boasting from Nicky, no words designed to put any special focus on what he did. One can’t help feeling drawn to a man for whom doing good for its own sake seems to come so naturally.
In The Power of Good, an International Emmy Award–winning documentary from Czech producer Matej Mináč, Nicky said he kept quiet about the rescue mission because “it was such a small part of my life.” The operation spanned only eight months, while he was still working at the stock exchange, and it was prior to his marriage. Still, to Ben Stafford and me, the explanation seemed inadequate. We pressed him on the point.
“When the war started and the transports stopped,” Nicky explained, “I immediately went into the RAF [Royal Air Force], where I stayed for the next five years. When peace came, what was a thirty-five-year-old man to do, traverse the country looking for boys and girls?” At the end of the war, Nicky was busy restarting his own life. What he did to save so many others just six years earlier was behind him, and over. For all that he knew, the children might have returned to their homeland (as some did). “Wherever they were, I had good reason to assume they were safe and cared for,” he said. Indeed, among their ranks in later life would be doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers, musicians, artists, writers, pilots, ministers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and even a member of the British Parliament. Today they and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren number more than six thousand.
That’s six thousand people who owe their lives to Nicky Winton.
“British Schindler”
When news of Winton’s heroic acts finally spread, governments honored Nicky with dozens of awards and recognition he never sought. The queen conferred a knighthood upon him. The Czech Republic recognized him with its highest honor. President George W. Bush wrote him in early 2006, expressing gratitude for his “courage and compassion.” Winton became known as the “British Schindler” (after the German Oskar Schindler, the subject of the Academy Award–winning film Schindler’s List).
In our effort to add to the chorus of friends and admirers who wanted Nicky Winton to understand just how we felt about him, Ben Stafford and I told him this: “You did not save only 669 children. Your story will elevate the moral eloquence of lending a loving hand when lives are at stake. Someday, somewhere, perhaps another man or woman will confront a similar situation and will rise to the occasion because of your example. This is why the world must know what you did and why we think of you as a hero even if you do not.”
Winton’s daughter, Barbara, said it well when she wrote of her father, “His wish is not that his story should promote hero worship but that, if anything, it
might inspire people to recognise that they too can act ethically in the world and make a positive difference to the lives of others.”
And that’s exactly what Nicky Winton’s story does. In a world wracked by violence and cruelty, his selfless acts in 1939 should give us all hope. It’s more than a little comfort to know that in our midst are men and women like Nicky Winton whose essential decency can, and did, triumph over evil. Winton often shared his motto, which should inspire us all: “If it’s not impossible, there must be a way to do it.”
In the nine years I knew Nicky Winton personally, I visited him many times. Friends I would bring with me were in awe of the man, who never thought of himself as anything special. My last visit was to mark his 106th birthday in May 2015. He passed away two months later. I’ll never forget him; nor will countless others.
Lessons from Nicholas Winton
Remember that character not only enriches lives; sometimes it can save them, too: Nicholas Winton rescued people in a desperate situation. He didn’t save those children to earn personal fame or fortune; he did it because that’s what good people of solid character do almost by second nature.
Don’t simply “do no wrong”; “try and do some good”: More than 6,000 people owe their lives to this one humble man. Winton didn’t stop at expressing compassion for the plight of the Jewish refugees he saw; he swung into action, organizing voluntary efforts that saved 669 children from the Nazis.
26
Witold Pilecki
Bravery Beyond Measure
In this great mortuary of the half-living—where nearby someone was wheezing his final breath; someone else was dying; another was struggling out of bed only to fall over onto the floor; another was throwing off his blankets, or talking in a fever to his dear mother and shouting or cursing someone out; [while still others were] refusing to eat, or demanding water, in a fever and trying to jump out of the window, arguing with the doctor or asking for something—I lay thinking that I still had the strength to understand everything that was going on and take it calmly in my stride.
Real Heroes Page 16