Gabriele Keenaghan still remembers the day in April 1939 when, at just 12 years old, she said goodbye to her grandmother at Vienna’s Westbahnhof railway station and boarded a Kindertransport to Britain, The Guardian reported. There were to be no tears.
“I was apprehensive and I was worried because Nazis in black uniforms were on the platform,” she said. “I was only 12 years old so I think they were frightening … terrifying.”
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Gabriele Keenaghan at home with Teddy, the only possession she was allowed to take when she left Vienna in 1939
(Photo: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian)
“People had been told that there were to be no emotional scenes, they didn’t want any emotion shown by anyone. I tried not to cry. It was very difficult. My grandmother … she smiled.”
Now, as Keenaghan approaches her 100th birthday, she is preparing to return to the station for the first time since that departure.
“I haven’t thought about how I’ll feel – I probably will feel emotional.”
Keenaghan, now 99 and living in North Shields in northeast England, is a retired head teacher who has spent years speaking to young people about the Holocaust and her own experience as a Jewish child fleeing Nazi persecution.
She was awarded the British Empire Medal for her work in Holocaust education, which she says is driven by the hope of encouraging “kindness, tolerance and acceptance of diversity.”
Her journey back to Vienna, planned as part of her centenary celebrations, will include several generations of her family.
The trip was nearly derailed after Lufthansa canceled flights from Newcastle, but a private donor later offered the family use of a jet.
For Keenaghan, the return to Westbahnhof is not simply another visit to Austria. It is a return to the place where one life ended and another began.
Gabriele Keenaghan in her great-uncle George’s garden in the suburbs of Vienna, just before she left for England, 1938
(Photo: Gabriele Keenaghan/ AJR)
‘I didn’t know what being a Jew meant’
Keenaghan was an only child.
Her mother, Hildegard, was Catholic and died suddenly in 1935. Her father, Josef Weiss, was Jewish and owned a business manufacturing heating stoves.
At the time, Keenaghan attended a Catholic convent school as a boarder.
She said she did not even know she was Jewish until after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
“The authorities came into the convent to tell us which schools we had to go to. We were all standing in the hall and names were called for this school, that school. At the end, I was the only one left standing. And I thought: ‘What’s happening to me?’”
At 10 months old with Mutti and Papa in Berlin, August 1927
(Photo: Gabriele Keenaghan/ AJR)
She was told she would have to attend a Jewish school, and a yellow Star of David was sewn onto her coat.
“I hadn’t realised that my father was a Jew. I didn’t know. I don’t think I even knew what being a Jew meant.”
The change was immediate and brutal.
“They called me a ‘dirty little Jew’ and I was a sensitive girl. It was upsetting.”
She would never see her father again.
He was deported to Łódź, in occupied Poland, and was almost certainly murdered in an extermination camp.
Her grandmother, also named Gabriele, arranged for her to leave Austria on the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that brought about 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-controlled Europe to Britain before World War II.
Keenaghan left Vienna with around 150 other children, traveling by train through the Netherlands and then by boat to Harwich in England.
She remembers being frightened and alone, but also perhaps feeling some of the excitement of a child embarking on a journey whose full meaning she could not yet understand.
Gross mama and I. Our very special photo taken together before I left for England, April 1939
(Photo: Gabriele Keenaghan/ AJR)
Building a life in Britain
Keenaghan adapted quickly to life in Britain and learned English.
One of her first jobs was as a nanny for a wealthy family in Woldingham, Surrey.
She still vividly remembers VE Day, when Germany’s defeat in Europe was celebrated in May 1945. The village’s nannies were given the day off and traveled to London.
“It was really euphoric,” she said. “I’ve never experienced such excitement and joy. People were dancing in the street. They were climbing trees.
“We were in front of Buckingham Palace and out came the king and queen and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Princess Elizabeth was the same age as me … she would also be 100 this year had she lived.”
Keenaghan later trained as a teacher in northeast England, where she met her husband, Ken.
The couple raised their family in Wallsend, and Keenaghan went on to become a middle-school head teacher.
She has returned to Austria many times over the years to visit relatives, including her grandmother, who died in 1974.
But she never returned to Westbahnhof.
Until now.
Keenaghan’s official 100th birthday is in November, but the family decided to make the trip earlier because of Vienna’s winter weather.
“I’m going to be like Queen Elizabeth. I’m going to have two birthdays,” she joked.
Her daughters, Pat and Christine, will join her, along with other relatives.
Both daughters have faint memories of their great-grandmother.
“The story goes that I used to call her Noddy Grandmother because I didn’t realise she couldn’t speak English,” Christine said. “I would speak to her all of the time and she nodded a lot.”
For Keenaghan, decades of telling her story have always been about more than preserving memory.
“I hope they have learned something from it,” she said of the children she has spoken to over the years.
Then she added a question that has become harder to ignore:
“But do we ever learn? Look at the world, look at the state it is in now.”