My father saved Jewish children because he refused to be a bystander – a lesson we urgently need today

It feels shocking to read those words 87 years later and to realise the similarities with today.

My father then draws a distinction that has stayed with me ever since. He writes of the difference between passive goodness and active goodness. Passive goodness, resolving to do no wrong, is not enough. Active goodness, he writes, is "the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering. It entails going out, finding and helping those in suffering and danger and not merely leading an exemplary life..."

He wrote that passage while organising the rescue of children whose families were being stripped of their livelihoods, their homes, and their futures. He describes them in the letter: "doctors, teachers, journalists, civil servants, whose only crime has been their outspoken defence of democracy."

Read that sentence again. Those words were written in 1939. They could have been written this morning.

My father was not religious and only Jewish by birth. He did not act out of communal obligation or shared identity. He acted from an ethical imperative. Because he saw what was happening and felt an obligation to act. Being prepared to take action rather than being a bystander is what sets him apart. His view that ethics is more important than religion. The refusal to ignore his conscience.

I think about that refusal constantly in 2026. Antisemitism in Britain and across the western world has reached levels not seen since the 1930s. The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2025 – the second highest annual total since records began. In the United States the figures are similarly alarming. Jewish students on campuses report feeling unsafe in ways their grandparents would recognise with a terrible familiarity.

At the same time across the West, the broader democratic infrastructure – independent judiciaries, free press, checks on executive power – that protects everyone, including minorities, is under sustained pressure. The mechanisms that allowed the 1930s to unfold are not historical curiosities. They are being promoted again.

Among young people, the warning signs are measurable. A 2024 YouGov survey for the Tui Foundation found that 21 per cent of young Europeans would accept authoritarian governance under certain circumstances. In the United States, a 2025 study by CIRCLE and Protect Democracy found that almost a third of young people aged 18–29 are sceptical of democracy and more open to authoritarian alternatives. These are not majorities. But they are proportions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

My father described this too. The people who hoped it would all come right in the end. Who felt that the situation was too large and too complex for any individual to affect. Who retreated into passive goodness.

I want to ask four specific things of anyone reading this, and I am asking within this community in particular, because this community understands better than most what is at stake.

Not a march. Not a petition. Something that requires effort.

If you have a spare room, consider offering it to a Ukrainian refugee. The parallel with what my father was asking in May 1939, asking families to take in a child and to guarantee their welfare, is not accidental. He knew then that abstract sympathy without concrete action is just another form of passivity.

Make an appointment with your MP or elected representative. Go in person. Tell them specifically what you expect of them on antisemitism, on democratic accountability, on the treatment of minorities. Politicians respond to constituents who show up. They are not moved by outrage that stays online.

Pay for serious, independent journalism. The funding model for accountable reporting is collapsing. It is being replaced by free, algorithmically generated content optimised for engagement, not truth. My father operated in a world of propaganda and wilful denial. His response was to go and look for himself. He went to Prague, met the families, and trusted what he could see over what he was being told. We have far better access to verified information today. We are choosing, too often, not to use it.

And within your own community, say something when people take the soft option. If someone makes an inappropriate comment, challenge them. Say something when institutional leaders equivocate on antisemitism, when the comfortable response is chosen over the honest one. My father's letter was not comfortable. He wrote it anyway.

He closed it with a line I have returned to many times: "Unselfishness should go beyond material aid and, by taking and looking after a child, one has the added satisfaction of knowing for a fact that one has done something constructive and worthwhile."

Not saving the world. Something constructive and worthwhile.

The people my father described in that letter, the ones who hoped it would all come right, and who felt they could do nothing, were not bad people. They were ordinary people choosing passive goodness over active goodness.

We know how that ended.

We are not without choices. We are not without agency. We are not without the example of a 29-year-old in a Prague hotel room who simply refused to believe that what was happening was someone else's problem.

Active goodness. It was his phrase and it is our inheritance.

Nick Winton is an international keynote speaker on leadership, moral courage and The Power of One. He is the son of Sir Nicholas Winton, who was knighted in 2003 for his humanitarian work in rescuing 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The original scrapbook containing his father's 1939 letter is held at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem