r/MadeMeSmile • u/RoyalChris • Feb 25 '25

Wholesome Moments Nicholas Winton helped 669 Jewish children escape the Nazis and his efforts went unrecognised for 50 years. Then, in 1988, while sitting as a member of a TV audience, he suddenly found himself surrounded by the kids he had rescued, who were now adults.

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u/faunaVibrissae Feb 25 '25

Why is this my first time seeing this? Also none of the videos on this sub have ever brought this kind of emotion out of me. My God this was so tragic and beautiful.. I hope he lived out his final years happily. I truly do. The world is full of bad people who seemingly get louder every day. This man was not one of them. This man was and will always remain a real hero. I hope more people like him appear soon..

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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '25

It is both sad and beautiful. And yet there are those who claim the holocaust never happened.

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u/faunaVibrissae Feb 25 '25

Those people are either supremely uninformed or they secretly support it. I can't imagine being like that.

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u/ComradeDizzleRizzle Feb 25 '25

It's almost always the second answer.

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u/Lopsided-Weather6469 Feb 26 '25

Or they are in denial.

My grandmother was born in 1920; even though she first hand witnessed the Nazi regime she was a holocaust denier.

She actually hated the Nazis for sending her two brothers and her husband to war (one of her brothers died, the other two men were severely wounded), but still she claimed the holocaust didn't happen or at least was greatly exaggerated.

She simply refused to acknowledge that people were capable of perpetrating something like this.

One day she told me how she witnessed her Jewish neighbours, including a girl her age whom she used to play with as a kid, being taken away from their home by authorities, never to be seen again.

I asked her what she thought happened to them, but she refused to give me a clear answer.

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u/bamatrek Feb 26 '25

It is absolutely insane what your brain will make or let you ignore to protect itself from horrifying realities. I'm disgusted by that, but also have to recognize that it's a design feature of the human brain. It's easy as an outsider to see the horror that causes and denounce it, but it's really more complicated that people like to believe.

It has some really hard to face truths about living in a human society when you realize how subconsciously people do choose willful ignorance.

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u/bigfootsdemise Feb 26 '25

Wow. Thank you for the insight.

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u/slartibortfast Feb 26 '25

Even back then. Winton would have saved thousands more but FDR actively refused them. The greatest president.