Sir Nicholas Winton recently turned 105. He is credited with having saved the lives of over 600 children in 1938-39, most of them Jewish, by arranging trains to carry them out of Czechslovakia and arranging foster homes for them in England. From the Guardian [via MA]:
There are around 6,000 people around the world today who owe Winton their lives. It was late in December 1938 when the stockbroker from Hampstead cancelled a holiday to go to Prague to see what was happening to refugees there. Winton spent only three weeks in the city - the most leave he could get from his job at home - but it was enough time for him to recognise the impending threat facing the refugees who had arrived following the Nazi invasion of the Czech Sudentenland in October 1938.
He immediately set about organising eight evacuations of the children on the Kindertransport train. He advertised in newspapers for foster homes, got the necessary permits from the immigration office in the UK, and persuaded the Germans to let the children leave the country. When Winton returned to his job in London on 21 January 1939 he continued the rescue mission, working in the evenings until the last train was cancelled when war broke out in September 1939. ...
What an amazingly modest, humble man:
But Hálová [one of those rescued] would never have met Winton had his wife Grete not discovered a scrapbook in the loft some 50 years later. He kept his rescue mission quiet for half a century, not telling even his wife or family. When the story emerged in 1988, it did so in spectacular fashion on the BBC's That's Life programme. Sitting in the audience, Winton was astonished when Esther Rantzen announced live on air that the woman sitting next to him, and much of the rest of the audience, were people that he had saved.