Grete Winton- What happened to Nicholas Winton's wife?

Grete Winton is the wife of Nicholas Winton. Grete Winton’s husband was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue 669 Jewish children who were at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. His humanitarian accomplishments remained unknown and unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years until 1988 when he was invited to the BBC television program That’s Life!, where he was reunited with dozens of the children he had helped come to Britain.

Grete Winton: Bio Summary

Who was Nicholas Winton’s wife?

Grete Winton was born on 21 December 1919 in Vor Frelsers, Nørvang, Vejle, Danmark. She was the daughter of  Ejnar Gjelstrup and Anna Marie Gjelstrup and the sister of Poul Herman Gjelstrup and Kirsten Gjelstrup. Grete’s father was an accountant.

Grete according to reports was working as a secretary at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in Paris when she met her future husband Nicholas Winton. The coup,e bonded over shared interests and very soon walked down the aisle on 31 October 1948 in her hometown Vejle, Denmark in a beautiful wedding ceremony in the presence of their friends, families, and loved ones.

Nicholas Winton and his wife Grete went on to have three children. Their son Robin Winton, born in 1956, had Down’s Syndrome, and was cared for at home, but died suddenly of meningitis in 1962. They had another son, Nicholas, and a daughter, Barbara Winton, who wrote his biography “If It’s Not Impossible.”

ALSO, READ; Nick Winton: Is Nicholas Winton’s son Still alive?

Nicholas Winton’s wife Grete is credited for discovering his scrapbook

It is the wife of Nicholas Winton Grete who is given credit for discovering, in 1988, his scrapbook containing information and photos about the children that Nicholas Winton saved in Czechoslovakia. When Grete Winton came across the scrapbook in her attic that belonged to her husband 50 years before, she was stunned at what she found.

The scrapbook contained lists of children and letters from their parents, dating back 50 years. The lists were the only remaining record of 669 children whom her husband Nicholas Winton single-handedly spirited out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 to safety in Britain.

As the couple’s son, Nick, discovered, his father had a trunk full of documents from 1938 and 1939, but the family wasn’t sure what to do with them until Dr. Betty Maxwell, (the wife of the late news magnate Robert Maxwell) heard the story and wrote an article about the incredible secrete Winton had modestly concealed for 50 years.

ALSO, READ; Barbara Winton: What happened to Nicholas Winton’s daughter?

Grete Winton’s husband Nicholas Winton organized a rescue operation that brought hundreds of children to safety in Great Britain. After the war came to a just end, Nick’s efforts became unknown, so it appeared until this incredible discovery.

Grete shared the information with Dr. Elisabeth Maxwell, a Holocaust historian. Robert Maxwell, newspaper magnate, and husband of Elisabeth, decided to take on the story. He arranged for his newspaper to publish articles on Winton’s incredible rescue of 669 children.

The BBC television picked up the story of Nicholas Winton and began searching for the children who had been rescued. Winton and a studio audience full of these children, now adults, appeared together on Esther Rantzen’s BBC television program, That’s Life.

In the clip from the TV show “That’s Life”, shot in 1988, Winton was shocked to discover that the feature is about him… and the children he saved years earlier are surrounding him in the audience. When Grete Winton’s husband realized that the survivors of what had become known as the “Czech Kindertransport” were surrounding him in the audience, he was understandably shocked and speechless.

ALSO, READ; Robin Winton: Who is Nicholas Winton’s son?

The scrapbooks and documents Grete Winton discovered are now kept at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, in Israel.

Cause of Grete Winton’s death

Nicholas Winton’s wife Grete Winton died on 28 August 1999 in Slough, Berkshire, England per her Findagrave profile. She was 79 years old at the time of her death. The cause of Grete’s death has not been made known to the public. Her husband Winton died in his sleep from cardiac arrest on the morning of 1 July 2015 at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough. He was 106 years old.

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