60 Minutes - Saving the Children

An extraordinary story from the Second World War - a humanitarian story that didn't come to light for decades. It concerns a young Londoner named Nicholas Winton who went to Prague, and ended up saving the lives of 669 children, mostly Jews, from almost certain death. As we reported last April, his story begins at the end of 1938, with Europe on the brink of war. In Germany, violence against Jews was escalating and the infamous Munich Agreement paved the way for Hitler's armies to march unopposed into Czechoslovakia. In London, Nicholas Winton had been following events and knew that refugees fleeing the Nazis were in dire straits. He went to Czechoslovakia to see if there was anything he could do to help. What's strange is that for almost fifty years, he hardly told anyone about what he had accomplished. And for fifty years, the children knew nothing about who had saved them or how.