A new street in Prague has been named in honor of a British hero who saved hundreds of Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Sir Nicholas Winton became famous after he organized the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Holocaust in an operation later known as the Kindertransport. In 1938, Winton visited Prague and became aware of the dire situation of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. He set up an office at a hotel in Prague and started taking applications from parents desperate to get their children to safety.

Winton eventually found homes for the Jewish children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain, where the youngsters were placed with foster families, including Winton’s mother, who took in one of the Jewish boys. The first group of children left Prague in 1939, and Winton eventually managed to bring in eight trains to Britain. Tragically, the ninth and largest train never left with most of the 250 children on board believed to be killed in concentration camps.

Marking the 85th anniversary of the last planned Kindertransport, a ceremony in the municipal district of Prague 7 was held on Sunday. In attendance were children saved alongside members of Winton’s family who came to pay tribute to their savior and remember those left behind.

Remarkably, Winton kept his heroic actions secret for nearly 50 years until his wife discovered documents in their attic i. The wider public learned about his efforts when he was invited to the BBC television program “That’s Life!” where he was reunited with some of the children he had saved. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 and received the Order of the White Lion award from the Czech Republic in 2014.

The children saved by Winton grew up to have their own families, and it is estimated that there are now more than 6,000 people in the world today who owe their lives to him.

“It is deeply moving to be standing here in Prague alongside fellow Winton children, 85 years since the Nazis tore our worlds apart. It was through the resourceful and courageous actions of Sir Nicholas Winton and colleagues that so many Czech Jews were given the chance to make a new life in Great Britain,” former Kindertransport passenger Lady Grenfell-Baines tells Jewish News.

Connecting the districts of Letná and Holešovice, the newly named “Nicholas Winton” road intersects Veletržní and Dělnická Streets. It retraces the same route used by Nazi transports that left Bubny railway station for the ghettos and concentration camps.