Film starring Johnny Flynn and Anthony Hopkins and photographs of Holocaust survivors pay tribute to courage of UK Kindertransport hero

The achievements of Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved the lives of 669 Kindertransport children by setting up an escape route from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, will be celebrated anew on New Year’s Day, with the release of the film One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins.

Young actors will be playing the small escapees on screen, alongside Johnny Flynn, cast as the young Winton. But the stories of the children are not over. A number of them still clearly remember the journey, and their faces, now captured for the National Portrait Gallery, provide a fresh and clear testament not just of their childhood trauma, but of the varied lives they went on to live.

“The portraits are fabulous,” Winton’s grandson Laurence Winton told the Observer. “It is so important that a story which is seen as part of history can be made into a real thing again, so people can connect with it.”

Gerda Svarny, photograph by Simon Hill
Simon Hill’s portrait of Gerda Svarny, one of the 669 Jewish children saved by Nicholas Winton. Photograph: Simon Hill Hon FRPS

The subjects, in their 80s and 90s, were photographed by Simon Hill, who was commissioned by Warner Brothers, makers of One Life. The resulting 11 portraits, including one of the politician Lord Dubs, will be unveiled at the London gallery on Monday before the launch of an online exhibition to herald the film’s British release.

“They all told me they had been extremely humbled by what had been done for them by Sir Nicholas, and how fortunate they felt,” said Hill, who took three studies of each face, including one shot in which they were asked to hold an object they had kept from that time. “I’d like to shoot more of them if possible. It would be a wonderful legacy of the film. Now is the time to mark their stories.”

Simon Hill’s portrait of Lord Dubs, one of the Kindertransport children.
Simon Hill’s portrait of Lord Dubs, one of the Kindertransport children. Photograph: Simon Hill Hon FRPS

Sir Nicholas, latterly nicknamed “the British Schindler”, rather against his own will, died in 2015 aged 106. As a London stockbroker in the late 1930s, he had travelled to Prague to see if he could help, prompted by deep foreboding about the harm Hitler’s regime was capable of inflicting.

“Hopkins’s performance as my grandfather is fantastic,” said his grandson. “He really gets the essence of him. He was a pragmatic man who never wanted to put himself forward. The filmmakers have done a brilliant job getting the details right. This is something my late mother, Barbara, really cared about. It’s why she wrote the biography of her father that the film is partly based on. She also wanted to make it clear it was not just him. Others were already organising.”