Incredible lives

‘I sat on the train & wondered if I’d EVER SEE MY FAMILY AGAIN’

On the 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport scheme, which saved 10,000 children from the Nazis, we reveal the incredible journey of 96-year-old Gabriele Keenaghan

It’s midnight, April 1939. Vienna train station is dark. Huge swastika flags are snapping in the wind, the platform crawling with jackbooted Nazis. Twelve-year-old Gabriele holds tight to her grandmother’s hand, trying to be brave, but inside she is terrified. Train doors start to slam and a whistle sounds.

‘Now, my darling, you must promise to write,’ says her grandmother, ushering her on board the crowded train.

Gabriele longs to cling to the safety of her grandmother. Instead, she grips her teddy bear and one tiny suitcase – all she has in the world – and boards, feeling like her little heart might explode.

ALL ALONE

As the train pulls out of the station and her grandmother’s face fades into the clouds of smoke, Gabriele knows that this is it – she is all alone on a train bound for a country where she knows no one. One thought runs repeatedly through her mind. Will she ever see her grandmother again?

Gabriele Weiss had been brought up in Vienna by her grandmother. ‘My mother, Hildegard, died when I was eight and my father, Josef, had to work, so I was sent to convent school in the week,’ recalls Gabriele. ‘I’d go home to Vienna at weekends, where I stayed with my grandmother, Gabriele, who I was named after. She and I were very close.’

Gabriele remembers how, in March 1938, aged just 12, they watched the Nazis march into Vienna. ‘Immediately our lives changed,’ she says.

Gabriele’s mother had been Christian, but her father was Jewish. She was labelled a ‘mischling’ – a Nazi term for a person of mixed blood – and forced to wear a yellow star.

‘The star pointed me out as different. I had things thrown at me and I was called a dirty little Jew,’ Gabriele recalls.

But it wasn’t until the night of the 9 November that year, Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass), when Nazi troops attacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues throughout Germany and Austria, that the young girl’s life became endangered.

‘I remember listening to the sound of gunfire and smashing glass as Nazi stormtroopers destroyed Jewish homes and attacked innocent civi