Bridging Generations

It has been fantastic to celebrate some really strong sports results this week, with the 1st XI boys hockey beating The Leys in the national cup, while the Under 14 girls beat the same opposition last week to progress to the last four of the national cup.  The girls senior teams also completed an impressive clean sweep over Bishop's Stortford College on Tuesday afternoon, while a good number of our boys were involved in Saracens and Northampton fixtures at the weekend.  I would also like to thank the staff and pupils who went to Seaford for the Tens tournament over the exeat weekend - great commitment - and although results did not go our way, they represented Felsted with great pride.

This week has also marked Holocaust Memorial Day, and this year's theme is Bridging Generations, recognising that the survivors of the Holocaust are now few and far between, but we must not forget man’s inhumanity to man.  Felsted marked this occasion with an act of commemoration, and I am pleased that this event was well supported.  This is what I spoke about in Assembly on Monday morning:

Under the theme of Bridging Generations, many of you will have noticed this statue just outside Liverpool Street Station in London.  This statue was put up to remember some of the children who fled from Czechoslovakia at the start of the Second World War.  Czechoslovakia was over run by the Nazis and anyone identified to have Jewish links was removed and sent to extermination camps.  The estimation is that 1.3m Czechoslovakian people were victims of the genocide.  
 

Over in Maidenhead is another statue, this time of the remarkable Sir Nicholas Winton.  This was his home station.  Sir Nicholas remarkably saved 669 children from Czechoslovakia, going to great lengths and facing huge risks to get visas, and foster carers, arranging train transport for these children.  His story is told in the film One Life and in the image linked below, there is one candle for the life of every child that he saved.

You can view the image of the Maidenhead statue here

I have written about Sir Nicholas before, but I hope that you will indulge me one more time.  Sir Nicholas was a pupil at Stowe School before the war, and I was extremely fortunate to hear him speak when he visited Stowe back in 2009.  He was 99 years old at the time, and he spoke in the school Chapel to an audience of several hundred, without the use of a microphone, and you could not miss a single word.

For many years, what he had achieved remained hidden.  It was only when, in 1988, his wife discovered a detailed scrapbook in their attic, containing lists of children, which was then passed on to Elisabeth Maxwell, wife of newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell that his story gained wider renown.  The reason why he had not wanted to talk about his achievements was supposed to be because his final train was due to leave Prague on 1st September 1939, but it never left.  There were 250 children on this train, but the outbreak of war meant that the train was stopped at the station and only 2 of the 250 children on board survived the war.

Famously, he appeared on That’s Life, at the time, one of the most watched programmes in the UK, and presented by Esther Rantzen.  If you have never seen it before, I would recommend watching this -  Sir Nicholas Winton - BBC Programme "That's Life" aired in 1988. 

The story asks a lot of all of us.  What would you do if you found yourself in the situation facing Winton in 1930s Prague?  

For this reason, and many others, it is so important that we remember what took place, even as events of that time become ever more distant to us.

Chris