How wonderful to see Sir Nicholas on the news today looking as fit as a fiddle although he's a hundred years old.
Seventy years ago he saved 669 children by organising their transfer from the then Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Britain. Before all that, he had to arrange official permits for their departure, secure their reception by British families, and to deposit bail. All this as a thirty-year-old, when asked why he did it he replied, "because no-one else was".
I first came across his story at the cinema in Olomouc a decade back when I went to see the film "Vsichni moji blízcí" with Rupert Graves playing him.
One of the things the film touched on was the treatment of Gypsies by the Nazis and ultimately how they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in much the same way as the Jews, what the Roma people call the Porajmos, literally, the Devouring.
A truly remarkable man who reminds us that whenever people ask "why do people do such terrible things?" we should never forget that there are always people who do amazing things. Good, honest, decent people like Sir Nicholas.
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