Kim Masters: The man who saved my mom from the Holocaust

Kim Masters, the Hollywood Reporter editor-at-large and host of KCRW's "The Business," writes at THR today about Nicholas Winton, who died July 1 at 106. He helped rescue hundreds of children from the Nazis, including her mother and aunts, and was the subject of the 2013 movie, "Nicky's Family."

Sample:

When I first met Nicholas Winton — this was before he was "Sir Nicholas" and before he became known as "Nicky" to so many of the Jewish children he had saved from the Nazis — it did not go particularly well.

Winton, who died July 1 at the astonishing age of 106, had come to dinner at my parents' house in Bethesda, Md. It was 1996. Only a few years earlier, my mother first had learned of the role this man had played in rescuing her, then 14, and her two sisters from the Nazis. That three young girls from the tiny Czech village of Trstena found places on one of the Winton trains — the Kindertransports — had been the longest of long shots. And for 50 years, my mother Alice and her sisters, Josi and Elli, had no idea who had been responsible for delivering them to safety in England.

Winton's role in organizing this effort didn't come to light until 1988, thanks to a BBC television program that connected him, for the very first time, with some of the 669 children who owed their lives to him. The following year, my mother and father met him in London at the first reunion of Kindertransport children.

Masters previously wrote about "Nicky's Family", and visited with him London for NPR in 2008.