Nobody knew, who Nicholas Winton was, or how we got to England.
Eva Paddock (née Fleischmannová), was born on the New Year’s Eve of 1935 in Proseč, Czechoslovakia, from where they moved nearly three years later to the capital city of Prague. Her father was an active regional politician, thanks to which he assured the honorary citizenship to the German writer Thomas Mann, and afterwards also a Czechoslovak citizenship. His help to Thomas Mann was, unfortunately, well perceived by the Nazi system, and Rudolf Fleischmann knew well that he had to escape from Czechoslovakia before the war starts, as the Nazis would search for him immediately. Meanwhile, when the war was about to begin, Eva’s mother Sonya heard about the trains heading to Great Britain, which could take her two daughters to a safe place. These trains were later known as the “Winton trains”, upon the name of their main organizer Nicholas Winton. Both of the Fleischmann girls were sent to Great Britain and stayed with the Radcliffe family. A year later, finally girls’ mother arrived to England, through Norway, and the family gathered again, and survived the war. However, despite their plans, they never returned to live in Czechoslovakia, where in 1948 took place the communist coupe, and so, they stayed in England and naturalized there. Until 1988, thanks to a television program of BBC, Eva got to know who was the organizer of her salvation, and her sister Milena met personally with Nicholas Winton. Eva was then living abroad with her husband, however, she met Sir Winton a couple of years later. Nowadays, Eva and her family, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.