The Scrapbook in the Attic

In December 1938, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled his ski holiday and traveled instead to Prague. What he found in the refugee camps — hundreds of Jewish families desperate to save their children from the advancing Nazi threat — changed the course of his life.

Winton did not give speeches. He did not organize rallies. He sat at a kitchen table and began the painstaking work of forging travel documents, persuading the British government to issue entry permits, and finding foster families willing to take in children they had never met. Over nine months, he arranged eight trains that carried 669 children out of Czechoslovakia to safety in England. A ninth train, scheduled for September 1, 1939 — the day Germany invaded Poland — never departed. Those 250 children perished in the camps.

Winton told no one what he had done. For nearly fifty years, the story remained buried until his wife discovered a scrapbook in their attic filled with children's photographs and lists of names.

This is the portrait Isaiah paints of God's Servant — one who does not cry out or raise His voice in the streets, yet faithfully brings forth justice. Not with spectacle, but with steady, quiet mercy. A bruised reed He will not break. A flickering wick He will not extinguish. The deepest rescue often arrives not with thunder, but with someone bending low, filling out the paperwork of grace, one name at a time.