It’s often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and in my research for The Child on Platform One I came across several improbable events: the rescue of hundreds of Czech children from under the noses of the Nazis by a London stockbroker; a concentration camp where Jews were allowed to put on music concerts; a three-way hijack enabling ex-RAF Czech pilots to escape communist Prague. Yet all these episodes really occurred. I set myself the task of coming up with a collection of characters and a narrative that threaded them together.
I first became interested in the Nicholas Winton story when I stumbled across the YouTube clip of Esther Rantzen congratulating this modest hero fifty years after the last Kindertransport had left, surrounded, unbeknown to him, by a sea of adults whom he had rescued as Czech child refugees. It makes for poignant viewing (https://urlzs.com/2SFW). That led me to research German-occupied Prague, and it was then that I read of the extraordinary events at Terezin (known to the Germans as Theresienstadt), where Jews had been allowed to paint, sing, play instruments, give lectures and act. Most notably they put on a performance of Verdi’s Requiem, ironically and subversively declaring God’s judgement on the Germans listening. As I mention in my acknowledgements, there is a DVD of the story of this event, but you can get a taste of it here: https://urlzs.com/Ut4Q.
I knew from Vera Gissing’s autobiography, Pearls of Childhood, that the children at Hinton Hall heard about the treatment of the Jews when listening to a radio announcement in March 1943. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a transcript of this, so I have taken the liberty of attributing to the World Service the words of Varian Fry, taken from his article ‘The Massacre of the Jews’, published in The New Republic on 22 December 1942. The full article makes shocking reading (https://urlzs.com/GANk). Even more shocking is the fact that the Allies knew about the death camps at this stage but seemingly did nothing about them.
Vera Gissing’s book provided me with much of the information about the lives of those young Czech refugees. To find out about the experience of being interred in Terezin as a young girl, I found Helga’s Diary by Helga Weiss very useful.
I would also recommend the DVD Nicky’s Family for more information on the Nicholas Winton story.
It has been a humbling experience to write of those who demonstrated creative brilliance in the darkest of circumstances. To be gifted in music, drama, art or design is to be blessed; to share those gifts from under the gallows is remarkable.