"For me, he is like a father," said Joseph Ginat, who was 10 when he traveled to England in August 1939 as part of the "kindertransports" organized by Nicholas Winton.

"He gave us life," said Ginat, now 80, whose brother and two sisters were also among the 669 children carried to safety. Their mother died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

To mark the 70th anniversary of the rescue, a vintage train carrying two dozen survivors, plus family members, pulled into Liverpool Street Station after a three-day journey by rail and ferry from the Czech capital of Prague.

Stepping off the train, the former evacuees were greeted by Winton. Frail and in a wheelchair, he stood briefly with the help of a cane and shook hands with them.

"It's wonderful to see you all after 70 years," a beaming Winton told the survivors. "Don't leave it quite so long until we meet here again."

Some gave him flowers; others posed for photos as a band played festive music.

Winton, whose parents were of German Jewish descent, was 29 when he traveled to what was then Czechoslovakia in winter 1938 at the invitation of a friend working at the British Embassy.

Alarmed by the influx of refugees from the Sudetenland region recently annexed by Germany, he feared - correctly - that Czechoslovakia soon would be invaded by the Nazis and that Jewish residents would be sent to concentration camps.

He immediately began organizing a way to get Jewish children out of the country.

Winton persuaded British officials to accept the children, as long as foster homes were found and a 50-pound guarantee was paid for each one, and set about fund-raising and organizing the trip. He arranged eight trains to carry children through Germany to Britain in the months before war broke out.

The youngsters were sent to foster homes in England, and a few to Sweden. Few saw their parents again.

The largest evacuation was scheduled for Sept. 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. That train never left, and almost none of the 250 children trying to flee that day survived the war.

Winton never spoke about the heroic rescue, not even to his wife, and his story did not emerge until 1988, when she found correspondence referring to the prewar events.

"There are all kinds of things you don't talk about, even with your family," Winton said in 1999. "Everything that happened before the war actually didn't feel important in the light of the war itself."

His wife persuaded him to have his story documented, and a film about his heroism won an International Emmy Award in 2002. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and honored in the Czech Republic. A statue of Winton was unveiled at Prague's central station Tuesday.

It is estimated that 5,000 people around the world owe their lives to Winton - the children he saved and their descendants.

"He doesn't think that what he did was a big deal," said Marianne Wolfson, 85, who traveled from Chicago to make the anniversary journey. "But we got our life back."