Barbara Winton (1953 – 2022)
By Barnabas Balint
I first met Barbara Winton in March 2018 at a Youth Workshop with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in Birmingham. She spoke to us about her father, Sir Nicholas Winton – Nicky, as she called him – who saved 669 children from the Holocaust. Since that day, I have had the honour of getting to know Barbara and working with her on Holocaust Memorial Days. Today, as we learn of her death, it is time to take a moment to reflect on her life, legacy, and how she would want to be remembered.
I would meet Barbara often at receptions for HMD, where she spoke passionately about the work she and others were doing to safeguard the memory of the Holocaust and raise awareness about its contemporary relevance. Although the daughter of a famous wartime hero, Barbara’s life was not rooted in the past, but in the present and the future. When her father was alive, he rejected being called a hero; instead, he hoped that his life story would encourage others to make a difference in the world, showing the impact that ordinary people can make. Barbara epitomized this in her life, too, as a staunch advocate for child refugees. When I interviewed her over zoom in March 2021, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, she told me that ‘talking about my father is only useful if it impacts on people today’. It was this philosophy, inherited from her father, that Barbara showed in every interaction that I had with her, and it is how she will be remembered.
Barbara was born on 23rd October 1953 in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, to Grete and Nicholas Winton. She grew up not knowing much about what her father did during the war: how he had cancelled a skiing holiday in the winter of 1938 to visit Czechoslovakia, where he was inspired to help children in danger. Over the next nine months, he and some of his friends arranged for 669 Jewish children to be brought to the UK and placed in foster homes. They organised their travel, visas, monetary guarantees, and homes. By the time the Kindertransport ended, he was convinced that he had failed, unable to help more people.
Speaking to me last year, Barbara told of how as a family, while they knew something about what he had done during the war, it was rarely a topic of conversation. Forever active, her father was constantly working on something new, and at the dinner table ‘if we talked about anything, it was his current project’. It was only in 1988, then, that details about this rescue operation became wider public knowledge, and the family was thrust into the limelight. After a BBC researcher tracked him down, his story was told on the air in an episode of That’s Life!, through the words of those whom he had rescued in a profound moment of television that, once seen, can never be forgotten. In the years that followed, and after her father’s death, Barbara became a shepherd for his history, speaking at events and publishing his biography “If it’s Not Impossible…” The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton.
The long-time anonymity of Sir Nicholas Winton’s actions reflect the philosophy that he and his daughter shared. For Barbara, history is made not of great acts of heroism by larger-than-life figures, but by ordinary, individual people trying to make a difference in their communities. ‘It is better to do something than to do nothing’, she would often say. Barbara, as with her father, was committed to the idea that everyone can do something worthwhile, no matter how small. Warning us against inaction, she admitted that it was easy to wait for someone ‘more qualified, more authorised, more resourced than you are’, but that they may never come. The solution for her was simple: instead of waiting and feeling inadequate, ‘it is better to take action’.
This was a belief that Barbara stayed true to her entire life. Responding to the recent international refugee crisis, she joined with Lord Alf Dubs to campaign tirelessly for the rights of child refugees and for their entry into the UK. Lord Dubs himself was one of the children saved by her father, coming to the UK from Prague at only six years old. Together, Barbara and Lord Dubs appeared in the newspapers, radio, television, and on social media. They were a formidable team that acted as a powerful reminder of Sir Nicholas Winton’s legacy, bringing many important issues into the public debate. Reflecting on her work, Barbara told me that sharing her father’s story ‘was valuable if it could give people some inspiration to do something for themselves that would help people out in the world’. Not only did Barbara hope this for others, but she practiced it herself. Because of this, her work campaigning for the rights of refugee children today seemed, she said, ‘to follow naturally’.
Towards the end of her life, Barbara’s thoughts turned to the future and to safeguarding the memory of her father’s work. She founded the Sir Nicholas Winton Memorial Trust to hold the historic and more recent documents, photographs, artefacts and memorabilia of Sir Nicholas Winton. During the covid-19 lockdown, Barbara, along with her son Laurence, daughter Holly, and husband Stephen, began to catalogue these documents and created an online exhibition. In a now deeply poignant remark, Barbara told me that she ‘recognized that this was going to take quite a long time and that it might take a longer time than I was going to find myself having’. The exhibition, therefore, published in February 2021, was launched with the aim to ‘show people what was there, so that if they wanted to see more, they knew where to come to find it’. Now, in the wake of her passing, the exhibition stands as Barbara’s final and everlasting act to ensure that we remember.
In Barbara’s death, we have lost a leading light. Through her, we had a powerful connection to Sir Nicholas Winton, reminding us of his life and his humanity. Her commitment to sharing his story and campaigning for its relevance in our world today has earned her a place in the history books, too. But, as she never ceased from pointing out to us, it is people who make up this history. The best way we can honour Barbara’s life and legacy is to remember her as she remembered her father: as an individual person determined to do something and help others wherever and whenever she could, in a true example to us all. I am struck by one of the last things she said to me, that ‘once there’s a live human being involved in any story, the story stops being a history textbook and becomes a life. And once it becomes a life, everything changes’.
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On behalf of the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies, Communications Officer Hannah Wilson reflects:
“I first met Barbara Winton during my time teaching at a secondary school in Newcastle upon Tyne. I had just finished working with a group of students on an arts project dedicated to the memory of Sir Nicholas Winton for that year’s Holocaust Memorial Day. The students won a grant and competition to have their work displayed at Westminster that year, and had created a “suitcase project” focused on the memory and legacy of those children who had been saved from the horrors of the Holocaust. As part of this project, the students also heard from survivor Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines MBE, who fled Prague on a special train arranged by Winton. Not long after the completion of the work, I had the honour of speaking with Barbara Winton at an event in the Gosforth reform Synagogue, where I showed her the students’ artwork. She was deeply moved by their efforts and their dedication to sharing the memory of her father, and kindly praised their achievements. It is undeniable that Barbara’s mission to spread awareness of the Holocaust and the stories of Winton’s saved children has influenced and inspired many, and that she will be greatly missed. We hope that the work of our association will continue to uphold the values held by both Barbara and her father, and their passion for Holocaust education”.
In Memory of Barbara Winton.
The British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies 