In December nineteen thirty eight, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton was packed for a skiing holiday in Switzerland.
Two days before he was due to leave, a friend telephoned from Prague and told him to come there instead, because something was happening and there were not enough people to deal with it.
Winton changed his ticket.
What he found in Czechoslovakia was thousands of refugees living in camps in the middle of winter. Germany had taken the border regions three months earlier under the agreement signed at Munich, and the people who had fled inward were now sitting in tents and barracks in a country that everybody could see was next.
He was there for three weeks. Then he went home to his job.
Before he left, he did something on his own initiative, without belonging to any organisation or having any authority to do it.
He set up a table in his hotel room on Wenceslas Square, put out word that he was arranging to get children to Britain, and started taking names.
The queue formed almost immediately and did not stop. Parents came with photographs. They came with birth certificates and with nothing at all. They came knowing exactly what they were asking, which was to hand a child to a stranger with an English accent and no official standing, on a promise.
Winton wrote down names, ages, addresses. He took photographs. He built a card index.
There is a detail that people find hard to hear, and it should be said. Parents queued to put their children on that list. They queued for a chance at it, and were disappointed when the list was full for that train.
Back in London he found that Britain would, in fact, admit refugee children under the age of seventeen, but on two conditions, and both of them were obstacles.
The first was that each child had to have a British foster family waiting, named in advance.
The second was money. Fifty pounds had to be deposited for every child, to cover an eventual return journey. Fifty pounds in nineteen thirty nine was a very substantial sum, comfortably several months of an ordinary wage.
So Winton went to work in the evenings, after his day at the Stock Exchange. He advertised. He wrote to churches and synagogues. He put photographs of children in newspapers and magazines with a note saying that these children needed homes.
Families wrote back, mostly ordinary ones, and chose a face from a photograph. He raised the guarantee money in donations, and where he could not raise it, he made it up himself.
And when the Home Office was too slow issuing entry permits, he had them forged, which he cheerfully admitted decades later, on the grounds that the alternative was to miss a train.
The first train left Prague in March nineteen thirty nine, days after German troops occupied the rest of the country.
The children travelled by rail across Germany and the Netherlands, then by ferry to Harwich, then by train to Liverpool Street station in London, where the foster families were waiting on the platform holding numbers.
Each child wore a label with a number around the neck. Older children were told to look after younger ones. They were allowed one small case.
The scenes on the platform in Prague are described in almost identical terms by everybody who was there. Parents were kept back behind a barrier. They were smiling, deliberately and with enormous effort, because a crying parent would frighten the children, and the last thing many of those children saw was their mother and father waving and smiling.
They arrived into a country that did not speak their language, in the last summer before the blackout, and were handed to families they had never met. Some of those placements were loving and lasted a lifetime. Some were cold, and a few were worse than cold, and the children in them had no way of complaining to anybody.
Almost all of them wrote letters home for the first few months, and then, at some point in nineteen forty two or nineteen forty three, the letters stopped coming back.
Eight trains ran between March and the beginning of August. Six hundred and sixty-nine children reached Britain.
The ninth train was the biggest. Two hundred and fifty children were booked on it. Foster families in Britain were expecting them, and had been written to with the date.
It was scheduled to leave Prague on the first of September, nineteen thirty nine.
That is the morning German forces entered Poland. Borders closed across Europe within hours. The train did not move.
The children on the platform went home, back to the families they had just said goodbye to. Almost none of them survived the war.
There is a photograph taken at Liverpool Street station of foster families waiting, and a corresponding empty space in the records where the ninth train should be. The list of those two hundred and fifty names survives, because Winton kept it.
Winton spoke about this very rarely, and when he did, he never talked about the six hundred and sixty-nine. He talked about the ninth train. In his nineties he said that the two hundred and fifty were the ones he thought about, and that if the war had held off for two more weeks they would have been on their way.
Then he went and had an entirely ordinary life for fifty years.
He served in the Royal Air Force. He married a Danish woman called Grete. He worked, retired, and lived in a house in Maidenhead. He did not tell his wife what he had done in nineteen thirty nine, and he did not tell his children, and it was not modesty in any dramatic sense. He seems to have genuinely regarded it as a piece of administration he had done a long time ago.
In nineteen eighty eight, Grete was clearing the attic and found a scrapbook.
In it were lists, photographs of children, letters from parents, and the names and addresses of the foster families. She asked him what it was, and then she showed it to somebody who understood what she was looking at.
A few months later Winton was invited to be in the audience of a BBC television programme called That's Life. He was seated in the front row and told nothing.
The presenter told his story, held up the scrapbook, and then turned to the woman sitting next to him and told her that she was in it, and that he was the reason she was alive. Winton turned to look at her, and his face does something that is difficult to watch even now.
Then the presenter asked whether there was anybody else in the audience that evening who owed their life to Nicholas Winton, and if so, whether they could please stand up.
The entire audience stood.
Winton was not the whole operation and he always said so, insistently and sometimes crossly. There was a team in Prague doing the work on the ground, including Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, and Chadwick in particular took risks in Czechoslovakia that Winton, sitting in London, did not. Winton spent the rest of his life trying to get their names attached to the story.
He also refused the word hero for seventy years, with the same argument each time: that he was never in any danger, that he did it in his spare time, and that the people who deserved the word were the parents who put their children on a train.
He was knighted in two thousand and three, and he died in July two thousand and fifteen at the age of a hundred and six. The descendants of the six hundred and sixty-nine now number several thousand people.
Here is something to think about tonight. For fifty years he had a scrapbook in the attic proving he had saved six hundred and sixty-nine children, and he never mentioned it once. What do you think that says about how he felt about the ninth train?