Book Review: One Life
The True Story of Sir Nicholas Winton
Save on life, save the world
Someone needed to go through this book with a big red pen. There is a lot to unpack in this book, and you don’t need most of it. It got to a point in this biography where I got bored. So bored in fact that I’m not sure half the book even registered in my mind. So, to say that this is one of the most disappointing books, and a biography of an extraordinary man no less, is an understatement. This book was repackaged and re-released on par with the Film ‘One Life’ starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Anthony Hopkins, so the title of the book was somewhat deceiving.
This biography of Sir Nicholas Winton, by his daughter Barbara, is about his life. It is supposed to go further about what made him save 669 Czechoslovakian children, most of whom were Jewish, from the invading Nazi forces. I was expecting a book about the Kindertransport. Let me disillusion you: it is about his life, not his heroism or the Kindertransport. The remarkable feat of saving so many lives was only covered in a few meagre pages – more was devoted to his work in an ice cream factory than the lives he saved in Czechia.
I wanted to learn more about the work he did in those crucial 9 months in Prague, I wanted to learn more about how he had to work with the Gestapo to get as many children as possible out of mainland Europe and into the United Kingdom. I was fascinated by how the Gestapo only indulged Winton’s request to release the children because Winton was ‘Aryan’. It is the more crucial details like that, that I was expecting. You could tell there was stress, tension, problems, and impossible hurdles to overcome – yet the book never truly touched on any of those.
Winton’s later war work was interesting, liquidating a lot of Nazi assets and giving the proceeds to victims of the Nazi regime was quite a landmark moment. It is rather sad and haunting that a lot of the assets taken to be sold for ready cash belonged to Jews. Artefacts such as art and jewellery – namely wedding rings were all sent to America to be auctioned off or melted down.
As I said at the start this book needed some serious editing. The minutiae of detail was a little too much and would only have been included because it was written by his daughter. You can also tell the daughter is not a writer – that is not to say that there is no structure to the book, but the dancing between the present and the 30s, 40s and 50s was somewhat discombobulating. What is the theme? Where is the motive? What is the story you’re trying to tell me? There was no distinguishable running thread throughout this book, which is a huge shame – the work of an extraordinary man, who was as human as you or I, made to seem dull and lifeless.