Last update - 00:00 18/10/2007
Briton who saved Czech-Jewish children in WWII leaves hospital
By DPA
Sir Nicholas Winton, the Briton who saved 669 Czechoslovak-Jewish children on the eve of World War II, was released from a Prague hospital Thursday and boarded a Czech military plane to fly home, Czech Defense Ministry spokesman Jan Pejsek said.
"The defense minister [Vlasta Parkanova] decided that he deserves the
transport home for what he had done for us," Pejsek explained. Winton arrived in Prague on a commercial plane.
The 98-year-old Winton was accepted to a Prague hospital late on October 10 after he came down with a high fever and bronchitis amid a busy schedule in the Czech Republic, CTK news agency reported citing filmmaker Matej Minac who made a film about him.
"He is joking around with nurses and he feels well but he needs to rest," CTK quoted Minac as saying.
Winton arrived in Prague in early October as a special guest of the annual Forum 2000 conference held by former Czech president Vaclav Havel.
During the visit he met with President Vaclav Klaus. The defense minister
decorated him with the country's highest military honour.
On October 9, Winton attended a moving tribute in his honour before an
audience of Czech schoolchildren and 17 children he had rescued nearly 70 years ago.
On the eve of World War II, then a 30-year-old stockbroker, he saved 669
Czechoslovak-Jewish children by arranging to bring them from then Czechoslovakia to Britain.
Winton had kept his heroic deed to himself for half a century. His pivotal role in the rescue operation was revealed in the late 1980s after his wife found a scrapbook documenting his work in their attic.
At the ceremony, Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said that the Czech
diplomacy decided to back Czech schoolchildren who had collected more than 32,000 signatures in their bid to nominate Winton for the Nobel Peace Prize.