Nicholas Winton

He refused to look through a glass darkly,Even though the truth should have blindedThe eyes of the living and the dead.Watched by savage dogs tied to savage menChildren said goodbye to their desperateParents standing on railway platforms.But these creatures were reared by a nationWho bowed down before a Lord of the Flies:The fair gave way to the foul in GermanyAnd men and women began to worship lies.This man did not consider himself a saint,But he knew that to abandon the childrenWould be to forever abandon his self;To commit moral suicide and thereafterTo live as a divided self, a stumbling,Lonely cripple nursing a sick memory.

In frantic haste and worry on a dayWhich never left him down the years,He welcomed two concerned RabbisInto his home – to help him, he supposed.But no – they were concerned, he found,But concerned that Jewish children wereBeing given shelter in Christian homes.Better to die in a kosher charnel house,It seems, than to live in a church unclean -The swastika flies for more than the Germans.‘Ein Traum is unser Leben’, but men,Not always dressed in black, create nightmares –But some men inspire when they show that life,Lived as it should, can rival the sweetest dream.