Dame Esther Rantzen, who died yesterday aged 86, leaves behind a remarkable legacy of compassion, shaped in large part by the charities and causes she championed.
Alongside founding Childline and The Silver Line and campaigning for assisted dying, one of the defining moments of her career was bringing the story of one of the Second World War’s least-known heroes to a global audience.
Nicholas Winton, a modest stockbroker from Hampstead, had kept the secret for nearly half a century when his wife, Grete, discovered a scrapbook in the attic of their Maidenhead home in 1987.
The scrapbook contained the names and photographs of hundreds of children. It soon emerged that, at the age of 29, Nicholas had helped rescue them from Nazi-occupied Prague shortly before the outbreak of war.
Sir Nicholas ultimately helped 669 children, most of them Jewish, flee Czechoslovakia for Britain by train. He also arranged sponsorship and homes for them under a law introduced after Kristallnacht.
In one of television’s most extraordinary scenes, Dame Esther and the That’s Life! team reunited him with many of the people he had saved, as well as the families they later built.
The emotional reunion was recreated in meticulous detail in the 2023 film One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and featuring descendants of those Sir Nicholas helped escape.
Dame Esther Rantzen and Sir Nicholas Winton, whom she introduced to the world as the saviour of more than 600 children from Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939
Sir Nicholas Winton meets Vera Gissen, whom he helped evacuate from Prague in 1939, during the first of two unforgettable moments on That’s Life! in February 1988
The moving encounter was later recreated in the 2023 biopic One Life, with Sir Anthony Hopkins portraying Sir Nicholas in his later years
Ostensibly a light-hearted consumer affairs programme, That’s Life! balanced comic features involving talented pets and oddly shaped vegetables with investigations into dangerous products, fraudsters and child abuse.
Dame Esther’s lively presence was central to the show’s appeal. She once found herself arrested after encouraging passers-by to try “bat soup” and famously urged Annie Mizen to sample champagne after the charming woman in her 80s told her: “I’m not a drinker.”
Yet one of her most enduring television moments, still widely circulated online, was the reunion between Sir Nicholas—who was finally knighted in 2003—and many of the children he had saved from almost certain extermination.
After finding the scrapbook in 1987, Grete took it to Holocaust historian Elizabeth Maxwell, the wife of newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, hoping that some of the children rescued by Nicholas could be traced.
On February 28, 1988, Maxwell published Sir Nicholas’s story in the Sunday Mirror, describing the children he had saved as “The Lost Children”.
That same day, Dame Esther invited him to appear on That’s Life!—with a surprise waiting for him in the studio.
Sir Nicholas recognised one person in the audience: Rudolf Wessely, a teacher who had travelled out of Prague on one of the Kindertransport trains.
The pair had met at an Abbeyfield Homes meeting in 1987. Sir Nicholas had founded the sheltered housing charity later in life, but that connection was not the reason he had been invited onto the programme.
From the front row, Sir Nicholas asked the woman sitting beside him whether she would change seats with him. She refused—and there was a deeply personal reason why.
The woman was Vera Gissen. In 1939, when she was 11-year-old Vera Diamant, she had been among the children Sir Nicholas helped evacuate from Prague. For years, she had been trying to find the man who saved her life.
‘We did find her name, Vera Diamant, as she was then, on this list,’ Dame Esther said cheerily, adding: ‘Vera Gissen is here with us tonight. Hello Vera.’
The camera panned to Mrs Gissen who – now very much acknowledging the man next to her – turned to Sir Nicholas, grabbed his hand, and pulled him into an embrace as the audience burst into applause.
Sir Nicholas, visibly stunned, could be seen dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief as Mrs Gissen told him: ‘Thank you.’
He was reunited with even more survivors on That’s Life! a few months later in one of television’s greatest ever moments
A visibly moved Sir Nicholas could be seen wiping away tears after being reunited with his ‘children’
Esther Rantzen with Sir Nicholas Winton’s scrapbook on That’s Life! The discovery of the notebook by his wife Grete sparked the saga that would reunite him with those he saved
The That’s Life! moment turned Sir Nicholas into a national hero. The Daily Mail labelled him ‘Britain’s own Schindler’ – after German hero Oskar Schindler
‘Hang on to your handkerchief,’ Dame Esther said, before revealing that two more children – Hanusch Schnabl and Milena Fleischmann (better known now as Holocaust awareness campaigner Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines) – were sat next to him as well.
Addressing a clearly emotional Sir Nicholas, the presenter told him: ‘I know you don’t want thanks, but you’re certainly going to get them.’
The moment turned Nicholas Winton into a national hero. The Daily Mail labelled him ‘Britain’s own Schindler’, after Oskar Schindler, the German who saved the lives of 1,200 Jewish children during the Second World War.
More was to come. On July 3 1988, Sir Nicholas was invited back onto That’s Life! to revisit the segment – and Dame Esther had another sensational surprise primed.
Asking the audience if any of them ‘owes their life to Nicholas Winton’, around two dozen people sat immediately around him in the studio stood up – all children evacuated from Prague thanks to his efforts.
Sir Nicholas flashed a brief grin – then, as he sat down, wiped tears from both eyes.
That it took decades for his understated heroism to come to light is no surprise: not even his wife Grete knew he had travelled to Prague in 1938 at the behest of his friend, Martin Blake, who was working with Czech refugee groups.
Sir Nicholas – known as ‘Nicky’ among his family – spent just three weeks in the city but set in motion part of what became known as the Kindertransport operation that would ultimately rescue 10,000 children from across Nazi-occupied Europe.
He chipped in to cover costs, dealt with the heavy bureaucracy and organisation and, reportedly, forged travel documents and bribed officials when frustrated by delays.
With assurances given that each child would come with a £50 guarantee (£2,900 now) to cover the costs of repatriation post-conflict, the first train left on March 14 1939, a day before the Nazis fully occupied the country.
Eight would leave in all, with collaborators in Prague including Trevor Chadwick seeing them off before being met by Sir Nicholas and others in London. The children were then settled with willing British families, never to see their own parents again.
What was to be the last train was cancelled by the Nazis on September 1 – the day they invaded Poland and closed all borders.
Sir Nicholas and his wife Grete pictured in Prague in 1991. He never told her of his heroic efforts until she discovered his scrapbook
Sir Nicholas was knighted in 2003 for services to humanity – on top of a 1986 MBE in recognition of his charity work
Of the 250 children on board, just two are thought to have survived the war, according to an interview Vera Gissing gave in 2006. The failure to get the final train through haunted Sir Nicholas for the rest of his life.
Initially a conscientious objector, he later joined the RAF and, post-war, he worked for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as the rebuilding of a battle-scarred Europe began.
Then, following a failed bid to run for Maidenhead’s town council, he disappeared into civilian life. Even as he committed himself to charity work, he never mentioned what he considered his unremarkable and ordinary deeds in Prague to anyone.
That was until 1987 – when Grete found the scrapbook and set the ball rolling on what became one of television’s greatest ever moments.
It gave Sir Nicholas the recognition he had long deserved, and Dame Esther would keep in contact with Sir Nicholas regularly, the pair reuniting on screen for ITV documentary Winton’s Children in 2003. He died in 2015, at the age of 106.
She would later reveal her belief that he remained humble about his achievements because he was haunted by the final train that failed to leave Prague.
Speaking on the phone before his That’s Life! appearance, Sir Nicholas had told Dame Esther that he ‘hadn’t saved enough’.
She recalled in 2023: ‘I said, “Why do you say that?”. And he said because there was a last train, it had 250 children on the train… they had closed the border and all those children had to be taken off the train.
‘That moment is reconstructed in this feature film [One Life]. It traumatised Nicky, and I think for him, the memory was of his failure.’
But even now, his legacy endures: a statue of him was erected in Prague Main Train Station in 2009, as a ‘Winton Train’ with descendants of those he saved on board left Prague on the anniversary of what should have been the final train’s escape.
It followed the fateful train’s route across land and sea before a final train brought passengers into Liverpool Street – where Sir Nicholas waited to greet them, as he had some 70 years prior.
Another statue was erected outside Maidenhead Train Station in 2010, while Sir Nicholas would receive the Czech Republic’s highest honour, the Order of the White Lion, in 2014.
Johnny Flynn and Sir Anthony Hopkins would later play him in One Life, the critically acclaimed biopic that ended with recreations of the That’s Life! reunions.
The film’s epilogue reveals that the audience in its recreation of the show was drawn entirely from the 6,000 people who are alive thanks to his quiet heroism.
Some of those in the audience travelled from Switzerland, France and Romania to England to be in the film, to pay their own touching tribute to a man who wanted no thanks for going above and beyond.
