I was debating on which show to watch and which to record when I began watching the “60 Minutes” segment about a man named Nicholas Winton.

All Nicholas did as a young man was to come out of his cushy, successful life as a stockbroker to save 669 Czechoslovakian children from the Nazi invasion. And here I was fretting about how much DVR memory I had left.

If you want to feel totally shallow, irrelevant and wasteful of life, watch a documentary about some humanitarian who has risked life to save life of people unknown to him or her.

If you missed it, let me tell you about Nicholas Winton, the 104-year-old British gent who put me in my place. It was 1938 when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Prague was filled with people desperately trying to escape — the wealthiest among them hoping to send their children abroad.

By chance, a photographer snapped a picture of a 29-year-old Londoner, who was on a two-week vacation, holding a small Jewish boy.

It was Nicholas, and at 104, he’s one of the few who can bear witness to that day. A successful stockbroker, he felt compelled to see if he could help anyone get out.

He went to the camps where the refugees were kept in the dead of winter with brutal conditions. He quickly set up shop at a Prague hotel with no experience or training that would qualify him for such a rescue endeavor.

To make British authorities take him seriously, he found established stationery from a refugee camp entitled “Children’s Section” and made himself “chairman.” A little deception, some smoke and mirrors, and later what he calls “a bit of blackmail,” (bribing host British families with his own money) were his tools.

A small office was set up in London staffed by volunteers, including Winton’s mother. He also approached America to accept some of the children, but was refused. Working by day, he stayed up many nights working furiously to find homes.

The first 14 children left in ’39, just before Hitler paraded triumphantly through the streets of Prague. Soon word was spreading that he was successfully getting children out and more and more people flooded to him saying, “Please take my child.”

Amidst the spreading violence and ethnic cleansing over the summer of ’39, seven trains carried over 600 children through Nazi Germany to Holland where the children boarded ferries for Britain.

It still haunts Winton that in Sept of ’39, an eighth train loaded with 150 more children was not permitted to leave because the war had broken out. There’s reason to believe few of those children survived since soon afterwards the “Final Solution” began.

After the war, Winton volunteered for a Red Cross ambulance unit, trained pilots for the British Air Force, got married and continued as a successful stockbroker. And here’s the most impressive part in my shallow little mind: For 50 years, he told no one what he had done.

When asked why he kept it a secret, he said in his cute, 104-year-old halting voice: “I didn’t keep it a secret; I just didn’t talk about it.” (If I swerve out of my way to miss a cat, I’ve already told five people by nightfall).

In ’88, the BBC heard about the story and invited Winton to be part of a program where he had no idea the people sitting all around him were children he had saved — who for 50 years had no idea who had saved them or how.

When asked who in the audience were saved by Winton’s campaign, every person stood up. The moderator said simply, “Mr. Winton, on behalf of all of them: thank you very much indeed.”

He wiped tears from his eyes and later said it was the best moment of his life.

For the last 50 years, he’s been helping mentally handicapped people and building homes for the elderly. When pointed out that he still lives at home and not at one of his homes for the elderly, he said with a grin, “Oh, I’d hate to go into one of my homes.”

Then, he laughing said, “Don’t print that.”

This mighty fine man used a two-week vacation to save 669 children, who have now multiplied to 15,000 grandchildren and great-grandchildren who never would have been. Nicholas was recently knighted as “Sir Nicholas Winton” and was celebrated in a documentary called “Nikki’s Family.” He is a hero in the Czech Republic, but isn’t really comfortable with all the adulation.

He said, “I’m really not interested in the past too much. Too many people look at the past and don’t do anything now.”

As for me, I nobly invited a woman with fewer items than myself to cut in front of me in the grocery store line the other day. But it hardly seems worth mentioning.