Prague street named after World War Two hero Sir Nicholas Winton who saved children from Nazis

• ITV News Meridian's Penny Silvester reports.

A street in Prague has been named after Sir Nicholas Winton, a hero, who saved 669 refugee children from the Nazis.

Sir Nicholas from, Maidenhead, oversaw the Czech Kindertransport, and arranged safe passage for children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia to the UK.

Four survivors, known as the 'Winton children' whom he rescued, now in their 80s and 90s, were brought to Prague for the ceremony.

The unveiling took place on Tuesday 3 September, which coincided with the 85th anniversary of the last planned Kindertransport journey from Prague, which was never departed because of outbreak of World War Two.

The new street named after Sir Nicholas connects two districts in Prague, bringing neighbourhoods together. At the unveiling, his son said his father would have been proud.

Nicholas Winton Jr said: "My father would have loved the symbolism of the new buildings coming out of this wasteland and the new road joining the east to the west, and the way that it connects two different communities together. If only that were true in the wider world.“

• Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines spoke about her experiences as a survivor.

The station, Praha Bubny, was where tens of thousands of Czechoslovak Jews were herded onto trains bound for concentration camps, but also where children boarded for Kindertransport journeys.

It has since been made into a memorial, and the nearby street along the underpass of the railway station will from now on be known as Nicholas Winton Street.

Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines was one of the survivors on the last successful Kindertransport journey, helped by Sir Nicholas, who gave a speech at the ceremony.

She said: "It’s deeply moving to be standing here in Prague along with the fellow Winton children.

"85 years since the Nazis tore our world apart, it was through the resourceful and courageous action that Nicholas Winton and colleagues that so many Czech Jews were given the chance to make a new life."

94-year-old Milena, was nine at the time and was travelling by train across Nazi Germany with Eva, her younger sister, who was just 3 years old.

She still has some memorabilia from that time, including an identity document, allowing her to be granted leave by His Majesty’s Government to enter the United Kingdom.

They then crossed into Holland, after being joined by dozens of other unaccompanied Jewish children, before heading to England on a boat.

The sisters were eventually able to be reunited with their parents, who had also managed to escape.

Milena's transport was the eighth, and final, train out of occupied Prague.

A ninth, the largest, carrying some 250 children, was scheduled to leave, on 1 September 1939.

But due to the outbreak of World War Two, the train never left, and it is believed they were taken to concentration camps where nearly all of them died.

• One Life - a film based on Sir Nicholas Winston's rescue mission was released in January 2024.

Sir Nicholas Winton was knighted in 2003 and died in 2015 at the age of 106.

His story was made into a film called, 'One Life', starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn, which was released in cinemas on 1 January.

The film showed how hundreds of youngsters were rescued from almost certain death in the Holocaust.

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