The Stockbroker Who Searched for the Lost Children

In December 1938, twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas Winton canceled his ski holiday and traveled to Prague. Jewish families were desperate, their children in grave danger as Nazi occupation loomed. No government was coming. No organization was mounting a rescue.

So Winton went himself.

He set up a makeshift office at a hotel dining table. Parents lined up for blocks, pressing photographs of their children into his hands, begging him to find safety for them. Over the next nine months, Winton organized eight trains that carried 669 children out of Czechoslovakia to foster families in Britain. He arranged travel permits, found homes, raised funds — one child at a time.

For fifty years, he told no one. His wife discovered a scrapbook in their attic in 1988 — lists of names, small photographs, the addresses where each child had been placed.

In Ezekiel 34, God makes an extraordinary declaration to a nation whose leaders had failed them: "I Myself will search for My sheep and look after them." The powerful had shoved the weak aside. The flock was scattered and lost. But God did not delegate the rescue. He came Himself — to seek the lost, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak.

Winton's quiet, personal search for endangered children offers a glimpse of what God promises here: a Shepherd who does not wait for someone else to act but goes out Himself to gather the scattered and bring them home.