Britain's Secret Schindler

You may not know the name Nicholas Winton. But the Briton has been honored in London for helping hundreds of Jewish children avoid Nazi concentration camps during World War Two.

The British are praising a countryman as Britain's Schindler.

For the first time, Nicholas Winton, 93, met some of the 669 Czechoslovakians he saved when he organized train transport from Prague to London at the outbreak of the war in 1939.

In all, eight trainloads of Jewish children were brought from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia through Hitler's Germany to Britain.

But it took 50 years before the young stockbroker's role was made known.

In the London ceremony Wednesday, Europe Minister Peter Hain gave Winton a letter from Prime Minister Tony Blair calling him "Britain's Schindler," after the German businessman Oskar Schindler, who also saved Jewish lives during the war.

A film documenting Winton's heroism also received its first British public screening during the event.

"This film is long overdue recognition of your extraordinary human achievement in saving Czechoslovakian children from death," Blair said in his letter.

Winton's deeds first became known when his wife, Grete, found an old scrapbook detailing the evacuations. She persuaded her husband, who was then nearly 80, to have his story officially documented.

On Wednesday, he met some of the children, now in their 70s, for the first time.

"Nicholas Winton has touched the lives of many. All of the children he saved survived the war, but few of their parents did," Hain said.

In 1939, Winton wrote in a letter that there was "a difference between passive goodness and active goodness.

"The latter is, in my opinion, the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering," he said. "It entails going out, finding and helping those who are suffering and in danger, and not merely in leading an exemplary life, in a purely passive way of doing no wrong."