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2010-11-03 Reflections of a Survivor Print E-mail
Joe Schlesinger was born in 1928 and as a child lived in the centre of Bratislava, below the castle which dominates the City. Growing up they often heard Hitler screaming on the radio, and watched Sudeten Germans marching and chanting (Dear Leader, liberate us from Czechoslovakia).

Joe distinctly recalls that one day on the way to school he was attacked by a group of thugs from the “Hitler Jugend” (Hitler Youth). The attack scared everyone in his family, and he remembers speaking about it that night over dinner.
His parents were among those who desperately tried to get their children to safety. He recalls his mother saying to a friend “We are sending our boys away until this whole thing blows over”.

Joe was eleven years old and his brother Ernie was nine when they left for Britain at the end of July 1939.  Because they were travelling from Slovakia, they were not permitted to  join the transport in Prague. They had to wait for the train in Lovosice, a border town of the German Reich.

Thus Joe and Ernie became two of the “Winton” children. Nicholas Winton together with his team managed to save 669 endangered children, most of them Jewish, from almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis and the Nazi collaborators. Convinced that war was imminent Winton organized eight rescue missions in 1939 that took  children  from Prague to Great Britain.

To Joe and the other 668 children, the horse was the train; the oil and wine were cups of hot chocolate; the inn was the British Isles; and the Good Samaritan, a young Englishman named Nicholas Winton. When the world around him was closing its eyes to evil, he went out of his way to do something about it. As Joe says “Nicholas Winton is not a hero, he is an ordinary, decent man who was not discouraged from doing the right thing by the world’s indifference.