Esther Rantzen and the TV Moment That Finally Honoured a Holocaust Hero

Dame Esther Rantzen will be remembered above all for her charitable legacy, having founded the children's helpline Childline and The Silver Line, a service supporting older people facing loneliness. Yet her broadcasting career also produced one of the most emotional and enduring moments in British television history, a scene that continues to circulate on social media decades after it first aired.

For more than two decades, from 1973 until 1994, Dame Esther fronted the BBC One programme That's Life! Under her stewardship, the show evolved from a straightforward consumer rights format into a series that tackled serious social issues while still drawing enormous audiences. It was on that programme, in February 1988, that the story of Sir Nicholas Winton reached a national audience for the first time.

Sir Nicholas had organised the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia after Nazi forces occupied the country in 1939. Born to German-Jewish parents, he compiled lists of children in need of sponsorship and arranged homes for them in Britain, working alongside activists and humanitarians to overcome considerable political obstacles.

One of the difficulties he faced was transporting the children through the Netherlands, which had closed its borders to Jewish refugees. His efforts succeeded in part because of a House of Commons ruling permitting young refugees into Britain, passed only a couple of months before his rescue mission got under way. With assistance from his mother, he published photographs of the children in British magazines such as Picture Post to help find them families, and he arranged for hostels to take in some of the refugees as well. He also raised funds to cover the children's travel and to provide essentials once they arrived on British soil.

Remarkably, his achievements went largely unreported for almost five decades. That changed when his wife discovered a scrapbook in their loft containing the names of the children he had saved. The scrapbook was passed to Holocaust researchers, who used it to trace some of the people he had helped, and the story eventually found its way to the That's Life! production team.

Dame Esther later recounted that when she first contacted Sir Nicholas, whom she knew as Nicky, she congratulated him on what she described as his extraordinary achievement. Speaking in February 2024, she recalled that he had expressed disappointment about his efforts, saying that not enough people had been saved. She said she was devastated that he felt he had failed and became determined to prove to him that every life he had rescued was precious.

That determination led to his first appearance on the programme, during which his scrapbook was shown to the audience. Two women he had saved as children, Vera Gissing and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, then revealed their identities to him on television. They were seated on either side of Sir Nicholas, who had no idea what was about to happen. Dame Esther described the moment as incredibly moving.

Lady Milena is among the most widely recognised Holocaust survivors in the UK. She left Prague with her younger sister Eva at the age of nine on a special train arranged by Sir Nicholas, and the two girls were cared for by a family in Tameside until their mother, who had escaped via Norway, arrived the following year. Gissing, rescued from Prague in 1939 at the age of 11, lost most of her family in the Holocaust and settled in Britain after the war. Dame Esther said it was the only occasion in her career when she had to pause recording to wipe away her tears.

The response from viewers proved pivotal. Several people who watched the broadcast contacted the production team after realising their own connection to Sir Nicholas. That reaction gave the programme's team the idea for what would become one of the most famous moments in the history of British television.

In the following episode, Dame Esther invited everyone in the audience who owed their life to Sir Nicholas to stand. He had been seated on the front row and, according to her recollection, turned to see the entire ground floor of the Television Theatre rise to its feet. The scene has been rediscovered by new generations online, and Dame Esther said she watched the episode many times, finding herself deeply moved on each occasion.

She remained in contact with Sir Nicholas, meeting him regularly until his death in 2015 at the age of 106. Knighted in 2003 for his humanitarian work, he received the highest order of the Czech Republic, the White Lion, in 2014. The two shared a lasting bond forged through the programme, though Dame Esther also said that hearing the stories of the children he saved made her feel immensely lucky to have been a Jew born in England in the 1940s.

Sir Nicholas's life has since inspired numerous films and documentaries, most recently the biopic One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, introducing his story to yet another audience. Through her decision to bring his quiet heroism into the spotlight, Dame Esther ensured that a rescue operation kept secret for half a century would never be forgotten.