Tonight, a television documentary will honour a remarkable man who saved more than 660 Jewish children from the Nazi death camps. Andy Smart met one of the survivors...
THE letter was waiting for Eve Prager when she came home from school one day in 1946.
It confirmed her worst fears. Her parents Karel and Ida, and 11-year-old Tomy, the brother she left behind in Nazi-ruled Czechoslovakia, were dead – exterminated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
"It was dreadful," recalled the 79-year-old retired teacher. "It is the most terrible thing you can imagine."
Little Eve was saved from the same tragic fate by the bravery and determination of a young Englishman named Nicholas Winton who, having witnessed the plight of Jews in Prague, organised a series of trains to bring children to England and safety.
And tonight, in a special Channel 5 documentary, Eve and others like her will pay tribute to the man who saved her life.
Sitting in the comfort of her neat Gedling bungalow, surrounded by books that include many about her homeland, 79-year-old Eve Leadbeater, as she is today, takes me back to Prague in the dark days of 1939 and the beginning of Hitler's final solution for the Jews of Europe.
She was just eight and has only vague memories of the rampant anti-semitism which came with German occupation.
"I know there were lots of Jewish people who lost their jobs; my father was a lawyer, but I can't remember if he had lost his job at that time.
"Lots of Jewish children were being sent abroad, my turn came in July 1939, but I was not aware of the reality. I think my parents must have done a good job of hiding it.
"I can remember being aware that I was going to go to England. I had a few lessons in basic English.
"Everybody thought it wouldn't be for long, it was rather exciting and like a holiday."
But in the months just before war was declared, Jews were already being shipped off to refugee camps and, to visiting London stockbroker Nicholas Winton, the danger was all too clear.
"Even though the true horror hadn't yet emerged ... I became convinced of the dire necessity to do something," he recalls.
He formed an organisation to rescue as many children as he could by train, returning to London where he spent every spare minute fighting bureaucracy to persuade the government to allow Jewish children in.
"The Home Office said I had to find a family for each child and have �50 for each return ticket, so I spent my evenings raising money," recalls Winton, now a remarkable 101.
"But the greatest breakthrough was when I advertised for guardians to choose the child they wanted to look after. If someone said, 'We'll take an eight-year-old girl,' I would send a card with ten girls aged eight and say, 'Here, take your pick'.
"It was a dreadful way of doing things, but we were under huge pressure to act urgently."
Eveline Prager was chosen by Miss Minnie Simmonds, a primary school teacher from Netherfield, and in her new home she waited for her brother Tomy to follow.
He never made it. As he waited for his turn to escape from Prague, war was declared. His train was cancelled and Tomy would die with his parents in Auschwitz.
"I was so excited when I heard he was coming," she said. "When I found out a few weeks afterwards that he was not, I was inconsolable."
For a while, letters from home kept her spirits up. "Then, certainly by 1940, they were just messages through the Red Cross.
"I wasn't quite sure what was happening but I suppose, gradually as I grew older, there was a suspicion they had been moved away from Prague.
"By the end of the war I was 14. I saw news film of the liberation of the concentration camps and then I knew." The letter, from an aunt who had survived the Holocaust, was merely the proof.
Eve had to get on with her new life. Raised by Miss Simmonds, a career in teaching was an obvious path to follow. She studied at Hull University and eventually returned to Nottingham to work at Clifton Hall, Brunts in Mansfield, and finally Carlton-le-Willows where she met her teacher husband Allan Leadbeater.
But she says: "I have had a busy life, a job I liked, but I never forgot them. I think there has not been a day since when I have not thought about my parents and my brother."
In the 1960s, Eve returned to Prague to be reunited with an aunt and uncle and several cousins who survived.
I wondered if she had been drawn to visit Auschwitz.
Eve, a thoughtful woman who chooses her words with care, replied: "I could not go.
"I think you will find very few of my peers who have taken that step."
Eve, with her husband, is a supporter of the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre at Laxton where she has planted a rose in memory of her family.
She says it took her many years to understand how the genocide of the Jews could have happened but, with despairing resignation, she adds: "When you look at the world now, and subsequent genocide, you realise that we have not learned from history."
Nicholas Winton's rescue operation has been compared with the exploits of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist credited with saving more than 1,200 Jews from the gas chambers by employing them in his factories, under the noses of the Gestapo.
He was later immortalised in Stephen Spielberg's movie Schindler's List. But Eve Leadbeater's husband Allan dismisses the link. "Winton was totally different to the Schindler story – the children ... they get quite upset by the comparison."
Between April and August 1939, Nicholas Winton organised seven 'kinder trains' from Prague. The first six brought out 669 children, the seventh carrying a further 250 including Eve's brother Tomy, was cancelled, its passengers condemned to their dreadful fate.
Britain's Secret Schindler, Channel 5 tonight, 8pm.
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