Son of kinderstransport hero Trevor Chadwick on film One Life

Number 20 was the wartime home of the so-called 'British Schindler' Nicholas Winton, and the movie was One Life starring Anthony Hopkins.

Chadwick's father Trevor was one of Winton's key helpers, on the ground in Prague on the eve of World War II, helping to bring 669 mostly Jewish children to safety.

Nicholas Winton is the subject of the Warner Bros film One Life about his wartime rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from Nazi occupied Prague

By chance, Charles and his wife moved to Hampstead in the 1960s, around the corner from where Winton did his work for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.

"My son and I were walking past and saw all these film people, we wondered what on earth was going on," says the 91-year-old.

"They were filming the house where Nicky Winton was living when he did all the work on the transport. My father must have gone there.

Trevor Chadwick was a Swanage Latin master when he became involved with Sir Nicholas Winton's scheme to evacuate Jewish children from Prague (Image: Courtesy of the Chadwick family)

"He came back from Prague in 1939, war was declared, lives changed. He joined the RAF, and was invalided out in 1944. I don't think he met Winton again. But on the three occasions when I met him, Winton asked 'what happened to your father?'"

Trevor is played by Alex Sharp in the movie, which is based on Barbara Winton's book about her father If It's Not Impossible.

Alex Sharp as Trevor Chadwick and Johnny Flynn as Nicholas Winton in the film One Life (Image: Warner Bros)

"I went to the opening at the Royal Festival Hall and I thought it was wonderful," adds Charles. "What can you say? Anthony Hopkins was wonderful. His performance conveyed the sort of man Winton was, and the film gave a very good impression of what it must have been like in Prague.

"My father wrote briefly about what an awful state of affairs it was, he said it was chaos and misery with lost children and confused refugees."

Trevor was a 32-year-old Latin teacher at his family's school in Swanage when Winton asked him to bring back two Jewish boys from Prague. While there, he met the family of Gerda Mayer and brought her back too - his mother posted the required £50 guarantee for her.

A statue of Trevor Chadwick was unveiled in Swanage

"Nicky asked him to go to Prague and bring them back, he located the boys and found this girl and said to his mother 'you have to take this child'. She came to live with us in Swanage for a few weeks before going to live with my grandmother. I know it was April 1st because I didn't know whether they had April Fools there and I wanted to stick something on her back.

"She was brought up in the family and became a wonderful poet."

Winton, a City stockbroker, who grew up in West Hampstead with parents of Jewish heritage, was negotiating the blizzard of bureaucracy to match children with British families.

Alex Sharp as Trevor Chadwick in a scene from One Life (Image: Warner Bros)

He asked Trevor to return to Prague, to interview parents, select children for the transport, and organise their departure. The film shows him negotiating with the Gestapo for visa stamps, visiting refugee camps, and doing magic to distract children who were separated from their parents.

"He was the man on the spot in Prague for four months organising everything," says Charles, whose brother William wrote a book about their father.

Nicky always said: 'Trevor did the most difficult and dangerous work, he deserves all the praise.' It gives a glimpse of it in the film."

In a story that seems to embody British decency and modesty, after the war, neither man spoke of the experience for decades.

After served in Bomber command, Trevor, by now divorced, spent time in hospital before moving to Norway.

"It was 1950 and I hadn't seen him for 11 or 12 years," says Charles.

"I joined up and was about to go to Korea. I went to see him in a hospital in Leamington Spa, he had TB. I saw him a few times in Norway but he never talked to me about the kindertransport.

"People didn't. Nobody talked about the transports for years. It was almost an accident that Winton decided to look up some old papers, the BBC got onto the story, and the truth came out.

"Nicky was a completely straightforward, honest man and the last thing he would have done would be to exaggerate his part in it. When he said 'I didn't have a difficult job' it wasn't out of modesty, he believed it to be true.

One Life depicts the famous scene on an episode of TV programme That's Life! when Winton sat in an audience of those he had helped to save (Image: Warner Bros)

Although One Life shows the famous moment when Winton met his protegees during a broadcast of That's Life!, Chadwick died in 1979 before the story became public.

In the past four years, there has been a statue and blue plaque in Swanage, he was named a British Hero of the Holocaust and now features in the film.

"The only thing my father wrote about it was that he would always have a feeling of shame that he didn't get more out. He only thought about how many weren't saved, that what they were able to do was tiny compared to what happened.

"Obviously I am proud of him for the rescue, but the last thing he would want is to feel pride at what they achieved."

Charles' son Samuel adds: "I was honoured and humbled to meet Sir Nicholas twice. May One Life remind us of the values he believed in and their importance today, especially for refugees and people seeking asylum."