One Life

September 16, 2024
“There are around 6,000 people in the world today who owe their lives to Nicholas Winton,” writes his late daughter in this straightforward account of his life, referring to the descendants of the refugee children he rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939. Winton’s story is well-known thanks to a famous 1988 episode of the British TV show That’s Life in which he was unwittingly sitting in an audience surrounded by the children, now adults, he had saved. The author, while offering a brief summary of how he arranged the escape trains, is more focused on “what impelled a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker” to take on such a monumental task. Tracing Nicholas’s life from his childhood in a well-to-do Jewish family to his student days, his career in finance, and his postretirement charity work, Winton is determined to “show the whole person... not just the myth.” Unfortunately, she does too good a job, perhaps taking too literally the centenarian’s request before his death in 2015 that her biography avoid “hero worship.” She writes that he was pushy, operated with a disregard for finding consensus, and induced “discomfort, dislike and irritation” in others—undoubtedly poor qualities in a father, but fitting ones for a hero. Readers will be left yearning for more details regarding the event that made this ordinary man extraordinary in the first place.