THE ULTIMATE
On this day, Mat 23rd 1707, Carl Linnaeus was born in Rashult, Sweden.
Linnaeus became a botanist and explorer, who develoed the principles for defining species and types of organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms, leading to a uniform system for the naming of plants and animals. He was born in a poor area of Sweden, and was unable to afford attending all the lectures at university, though he was eventually able to by teaching botany. As a young man he devloped his ideas and principles, that he was to set out in a number of works, whilst carrying out studies in Lapland amongst the Sami people, of Northern Scandinavia. He also gained his medical qualifications whilst in the Netherlands, where he began to gain the sponsors he needed in order to publish his ideas. Back in Sweden he practised medicine, but sought to return to the study of botany, and was able to build up a network of exploring botanists, who travelled the world at the time of European exploration, bringing to him more specimens to be placed in the growing tree of life his naming system was steadily mapping.
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On this day, May 19th 1909, Nicholas Winton was born.
Nicholas Winton was a British humanitarian known for rescuing 669 Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of World War Two. He created an organisation to find homes for the children and the safe passage of the children by train across Europe to Britain. He wrote to other countries, but only Sweden also took in the freed Jewish children. This way the children escaped the Nazis and the Holocaust, in which many of their parents perished. He refused to talk about his actions in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, for decades until his wife found his scrapbook with details of the children he had helped in the loft. Then in 1988 a BBC programme reunited him with many children, now adults, who he had saved. Nicholas was always modest about his role, saying that others had done the more dangerous work of collecting the children and putting them on the trains to safety. He also regretted the children he couldn't save, only a few on the last train out of Prague station survived the war. He also believed had other countries responded to his letters calling for homes for the children he could hae saved more. In 2003 he was knighted by the Queen for his services to humanity in saving Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. In 2014 he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic. |
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