December 1938. Nicholas Winton is planning a skiing holiday in Switzerland, but a call from Czechoslovakia that the Nazis are devouring in phases changes his destination. With the Sudeten region already occupied by Hitler, the camps of impoverished refugees expand throughout Prague. Many are Jewish children. His friend Martin Blake, close to British Labor circles like him, is already there collaborating in helping the Jewish population. Seeing the dramatic situation of thousands of people, Winton, a stockbroker whose German Jewish parents emigrated at the beginning of the century and who Britishized their surname and converted to Christianity to integrate, draws up a plan to remove as many children as possible from there. possible. They will manage to save 669, with the last train disappearing, with 250 more, due to the outbreak of the World War in 1939. Among those saved will be the one who would later become the filmmaker Karel Reisz.
After saving the children, Winton will forget the episode and it will not come to light until 50 years later when his wife finds a box in the attic with photos of the children. It will be the beginning of many awards and recognitions and, organized by the BBC, a reunion of Winton – who died at the age of 106 in 2015 – with many of those children. And that story has now inspired both the film One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins, and the historical intrigue novel Winton's Children (Alfaguara), with which Fabiano Massimi (Modena, 1977) returns for the third consecutive time to the world of Nazi Germany after the successful crime novel The Angel of Munich and the celebrated thriller The Demons of the Reich.
“Nazism – explains Massimi – is an era about which we have the impression we already know a lot and naturally this is not true. Upon learning the story of Geli Raubal, Hitler's niece, which I describe in The Angel of Munich, he called me, I had to write it. And from there, when I studied the period in more depth, I was impressed to see how similar it was to our world today. The 1930s of the last century are very similar to the 1920s of this new century, so I decided to look even further ahead to see better. So my next book, Demons of the Reich, talked about the Reichstag fire and it was impressive because while I was finishing writing it, the Trumpists in Washington tried to do the same thing."
To top it all off, he says, he was preparing the third book in the series when he discovered the story of the Winton children and, he says, "at that same moment the same thing was happening in Ukraine. A foreign state has attacked the nation, the families They have kept the children safe, and there were scenes in the train stations with children in the carriages stretching their hands out to the glass and parents on the platform doing the same. I had literally seen in photographs from the 1930s of Prague "The same scene, and I was forced to tell it to understand the points of contact and difference. It is not that I am specializing in Nazism, it is that it seems that our time is specializing in Nazism."
“What are the points of contact? There is general impoverishment, very high inflation and a return to confinement in the States, nationalism, the growth of the extreme right, the problem of emigrants and political parties that blame everything on foreigners. Even the way we look at the world is the same: we are afraid. In the 1920s, Europe was about happiness, the desire to live. A beautiful époque after the First World War. The 1930s brought fear just as it did in the world after 2008, with the stock market crash, poverty, the fear that children will have a worse life than their parents, cynicism, the general feeling that only one War can solve the problems. And there are so many small wars that are beginning to tighten the circle... This is what we are experiencing. How many times do you hear it said that overpopulation, the climate problem, the economic problem, would be resolved only with a great conflict. “They are the same things,” he asserts.
Luckily, he acknowledges, something has already changed: “Europe is afraid of another Czechoslovakia. In 1938 the peace conference that gave a piece of the country to Hitler was held in Munich, and when Ukraine was invaded, the meeting was also held in Munich. Politicians know the history very well and are aware of the dangers.”
Massimi says that he discovered Winton's story on WhatsApp at the beginning of the pandemic while the end of the world seemed to be approaching. “They gave me the four and a half minute video in which he, in 1988, now an old man, is rediscovered at the BBC. They tell his story on the program, everyone is surprised, they applaud him and, suddenly, the presenter goes to the audience and asks: 'Is there anyone this afternoon who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?' And they all rise up. A story that filled me with hope in a hopeless period. And the same thing happened to my friends when I explained it to them. That's why I wanted to write about her, a story that for once shows good."
Because, he asks, "what drove the protagonists to carry out this operation?" They did not have, he assumes, "strong motives." "Doreen Warriner had been to Czechoslovakia many times and perhaps had had a love affair there with a important politician. She was English but her heart was in Prague. The English gave a piece of the country to Hitler and he was outraged. She had a political, personal, and moral motivation. Nicholas Winton had no contact, he was going on a white week when his friend called him. In an instant he decided to go and do what he could. He was not a volunteer, a humanitarian. He was a stockbroker. Perhaps he prompted a sense of justice, or horror. As for Trevor Chadwick, he was an elementary school teacher who worked at the school founded by his father and who went to Prague to choose two children that the school wanted to adopt to save them. How do you choose? After doing so he could no longer sleep at night, he had seen all those thousands of children and returned to Prague out of guilt."
All of them, he concludes, "are intimate motivations, they gained nothing by doing it and they knew that history would not remember them. And in fact they did nothing to be remembered. Today when we do nothing without reason and gain, time seems precious and everything "What we do we run to show everyone and we even photograph the dishes we eat, it seems impossible to do something just because it is necessary to do it, because it is the right thing to do. It is heroism."
And Massimi, a graduate in Philosophy, talks about the inevitable question that always appears when writing about Nazism, the question of evil. ”There is an American writer who writes thrillers of the highest quality, Lee Child, who has extraordinary intelligence and who was once asked why his character, Jack Reacher, causes so much fascination and sells millions of copies. A man who is traveling through the United States, arrives in a small town and discovers someone who is mistreating, killing, kills him and resolves the situation, and leaves. Child responded that we think that evil and cruelty, violence, are things limited to some aberrant people. 'But if I asked you to think about a person you hate, maybe a neighbor, your boss at work, the one who stole your girlfriend, if you could go and shoot him in the head and no one would do anything to you, wouldn't you? You could be imprisoned or held responsible, would you do it?' "It's a wonderful question."
In that sense, he says, "Nazism has been the most criminal era in history, where cruelty and violence were permitted, and that is enough for evil to come to the fore. The idea is enough that if I do it They don't eliminate me but they even incite me. In William Golding's wonderful novel Lord of the Flies, children alone on an island, instead of living in peace, kill each other. They make war because it is an instinct we have. If no one "It controls, sanctions, judges, what we carry inside comes out. What worries me today is that so many governments and societies are letting violence go, telling their citizens that they can carry it out."
