An ordinary man who achieved the extraordinary. Here was someone who at a a time when others were were wringing their hands in despair just acted and saved the lives of 669 children! How did he do it?
To quote him: "If in 1938 I had taken the advice of most of the people who were seeing exactly the same as what I was seeing in Czechoslovakia. There were limits to the number of families that could move and that meant that the children also couldn’t move. Could the children be moved without the families? Everybody knew that it was a problem. Everybody I talked to was quite certain it’s hopeless - you won’t ever be able to get the permission to do that, but nobody had asked."
So he asked the British Foreign Office and gained the permissions!
The moral was he said "Above all, believe that nothing is impossible. If it is not impossible there must be a way of doing it. Don’t be content to think what other people say that you can’t do it."
He also expressed it in this way. "If it's not impossible then it's possible. So do it."
Such a simple idea but what leverage it provided.
Of course there may always be incredulity at the disparity between man and his achievements but to witness it as I did when one of the elderly kindertransport children said to to him "thank you father" enabled me to feel the magnitude of his achievement.
