A Fictional Rescue Turns True
How the story of Nicholas Winton’s rescue of 669 Jewish children found resonance for one historical novelist
Fiction writers talk a lot about how the characters they create become very real to them. How these people live inside their heads long past the time they finish writing their books, like friends or family members who reside in another state.
Still, even novelists recognize the difference between reality and fiction, and no matter how real any writers’ characters become, no one expects them to turn up in the actual world.
But the day the obituary for Nicholas Winton, the British man who’d rescued 669 Jewish children from the Holocaust popped up on my computer screen, I did for a moment, have the unsettling sensation that two characters from my most recent novel had escaped from my head and slipped out into the world.
It’s true that the rescue my characters attempt is of fewer children than 669, and since they live in a fictional world, they use something more dramatic than the forged documents Mr. Winton employed. Still, there were the elements of my invented story woven throughout Mr. Winton’s actual one.
As a writer of historical fiction, I’m used to having portions of my books exist in the real world. In the same novel that echoed Nicholas Winton’s life, I wrote about the St. Louis, an actual boat that sailed from Hamburg in 1939 carrying 900 Jews intending to flee Hitler’s Germany. At the same time the St. Louis was being turned away at the ports of Cuba and the United States, as it was sailing back toward Germany, its 900 passengers under suicide watch, it is likely Nicholas Winton was bribing Nazi officials into helping him spirit Jewish children out of Czechoslovakia.
I also wrote about Camp Siegfried, an actual summer camp run by the German Bund in Yaphank, Long Island in the years leading up to World War II. It is equally likely that at the same time the Long Island Railroad was running extra trains to accommodate all the Bund members who wished to travel to Camp Siegfried so they could spend time goose-stepping in swastika-covered uniforms, Nicholas Winton was in London, arranging foster homes for those Jewish children.
Despite all the research I’d done for my book, I’d never heard of Nicholas Winton until I read his obituary. And once I read it, his story stayed with me for days.
At first, I believed it was because it had echoed that of my characters.
But now, I believe it is the story itself.
I think when we write historical fiction, we are attempting to write events the way we wished they had happened, to create a kind of fictional correction. The story of Nicholas Winton — a British man who was willing to forge documents and bribe Nazi officials to save Jewish children from the Holocaust — is, to me, a real-life correction. A promising proof that such people do not only exist in writers’ imaginations.
Janis Cooke Newman is the author of A Master Plan for Rescue (July 2015) from Riverhead.
The book is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.
Top image: Statue of Sir Nicholas Winton at Maidenhead Railway Station in Berkshire, England.
Credit: Peter Reed, via Creative Commons
