More forgotten heroes of the kindertransports

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/more-forgotten-heroes-of-the-kindertransports

Version 0 of 1.

Another “forgotten hero” of the kindertransports (Nicholas Winton obituary, 2 July; Letters, 4 July) was a colleague of mine at International PEN: Bill Barazetti, a Swiss, with close family ties to Thomas and Jan Masaryk.

As a 19-year-old Swiss law student in Hamburg, in 1933, Bill witnessed attacks on Jews, socialists and communists and decided to help such “undesirables” escape Germany. He himself was beaten up trying to escape and left for dead. A Czech co-worker took him to Prague and nursed him back to health, and they married in 1936. Until the Munich agreement in 1938 he was able to work as a Czech agent, and then joined with church-based charities to help evacuate tens of thousands of the refugees flooding into Czechoslovakia.

In January 1939 Bill was recommended to Nicholas Winton to work with Trevor Chadwick on the kindertransports, he organised trains, interviewed the families, sent the children’s details and photographs to London and found a printer to forge their papers. Caught by the Gestapo, he was released after intervention by a Swiss relative, and managed to get to Warsaw to obtain a passport in a new name from the British Embassy, returning to Prague to continue the work. He left for Britain in August 1939. Bill was a very modest man, and his role in the kindertransport was unknown until 1989, when he mentioned it in conversation with an Israeli who had been on a Berlin kindertransport. More was revealed in the diaries of Nicholas Winton, who noted that he had left the entire Prague kindertransport operation to Bill. In 1993, Yad Vashem honoured Bill as one of the Righteous among the Gentiles.Jane SpenderLondon

• In August 1939, in full regimental uniform, including kilt, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Henry Levey (Scots Guards) used his rank and personal power to negotiate with the SS in Berlin and secure exit visas for boys at the ORT engineering school. Faced with an evacuated British embassy, he broke in with a local employee and personally stamped every child’s passport with a British stamp, required by the Germans before allowing them to leave. The 106 boys and seven teachers, led by Col Levey, left by train on 26 August. Sadly, the head and a further 100 boys, due to travel on 3 September, could not leave; most did not survive.

Col Levey died in 1970 unrecognised. My father, Jan Gessler, one of his “boys”, remained grateful to be British for the rest of his life.Sue GesslerLondon

• In his letter of 4 July, your correspondent claims that Doreen Warriner is “largely forgotten”. Not quite! She was already a prominent agricultural economist in the 1930s. After the war she taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, eventually becoming a professor. As a student I found her a modest and inspiring teacher of economic history, who readily admitted what she did not know. In 1950 she published Revolution in Eastern Europe, and briefly joined the Communist party. She later published a large number of highly regarded books about agrarian developments in many parts of the world.RW DaviesEmeritus professor of Soviet economic history, St Albans, Hertfordshire