Esther Rantzen and the TV Moment That Introduced a Holocaust Hero to the World

Dame Esther Rantzen will be remembered for many things — her charity work, her decades in broadcasting, and her role in founding helplines such as Childline and The Silver Line. Among her most enduring achievements, however, is a single television episode from 1988 that introduced the British public to Nicholas Winton, the man who organised the rescue of hundreds of children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Rantzen presented BBC One's That's Life! from 1973 to 1994, steering the programme from its origins as a consumer rights show into a broader series built around social issues. That transformation helped it draw large audiences and gave it the platform to tell stories with real emotional weight — none more so than Winton's.

Winton had arranged for 669 children, most of them Jewish, to escape Czechoslovakia after Nazi forces occupied the country in 1939. He had travelled briefly to Prague, where he compiled lists of children in need of sponsorship and set about finding British homes for them. Born to German-Jewish parents, he worked with activists and humanitarians in Czechoslovakia to overcome daunting political barriers, including the closure of the Netherlands' borders to Jewish refugees.

His efforts succeeded in part because of a House of Commons ruling passed a couple of months before his mission began, which permitted young refugees to enter Britain. With help from his mother, Winton published photographs of the children in magazines such as Picture Post to appeal for homes, arranged for hostels to take in some of the refugees, and raised money to cover travel costs and provide essentials once the children arrived.

For nearly 50 years, his work went largely unnoticed. That changed when his wife discovered a scrapbook in their loft containing the names of the children he had saved. The scrapbook was passed to Holocaust researchers, who used it to trace some of the survivors. Winton's story soon reached the news, and in February 1988 it reached Rantzen.

Speaking in February 2024, Rantzen recalled contacting Winton, whom she called Nicky, and congratulating him on what she described as an extraordinary achievement. She told The Radio Times that he had voiced disappointment about his efforts, saying "not enough" people had been saved. "I was devastated that he felt he had failed," she said. "I wanted to prove to this extraordinary man that every life he had saved was precious."

She invited him onto That's Life!, and during that first appearance his scrapbook was shown to the studio audience. Two women he had rescued as children — Vera Gissing and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines — then revealed their identities to him on television. They were seated on either side of Winton, who had no idea the surprise was coming. Rantzen later described the moment as "incredibly moving."

Lady Milena is among the most recognised Holocaust survivors in the UK. She left Prague with her younger sister Eva at the age of nine on a special train Winton had arranged. The sisters were cared for by a Tameside family until their mother arrived the following year, having escaped through Norway. Gissing, rescued from Prague in 1939 at the age of 11, lost most of her family in the Holocaust and settled in Britain after the war.

For Rantzen, the encounter left a lasting mark. "That was the only time in my career when I had to stop recording to wipe away my tears," she said. The broadcast also prompted viewers to contact the production team after realising their own connection to Winton, planting the seed for what would become one of British television's most famous scenes.

"In our next episode, I asked all those who owed their lives to him to stand, and Nicky, whom we had seated on the front row, turned to see the whole ground floor of the Television Theatre on their feet," Rantzen recalled. The image of Winton rising to acknowledge a theatre full of people he had saved has since been rediscovered repeatedly on social media by new generations.

Winton was knighted in 2003 for his humanitarian work. He kept in touch with Rantzen and the two met regularly until his death in 2015 at the age of 106. Rantzen said she watched the episode many times and found herself deeply moved on each occasion. She also said hearing the stories of the children he saved made her feel immensely lucky to have been a Jew born in England in the 1940s.

Winton's life has since inspired numerous films and documentaries, most recently the biopic One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, extending the reach of a story that might have remained hidden had a scrapbook stayed in a loft — and had a television presenter not decided that a quiet hero deserved a moment in the spotlight.