Gabriele Keenaghan as a young girl in Vienna in 1938 (Gabriele Keenaghan/AJR)[Missing Credit]
Now a prominent Holocaust educator, Gabriele plans to return to the place where her life was saved – Westbahnhof – this time with her children and grandchildren with her as she approaches her hundredth birthday.
However, her birthday plans were almost ruined when German airline Lufthansa cancelled its routes between Newcastle and Vienna.
But the trip was salvaged by the generosity of a good Samaritan who offered the use of a private jet.
“I sincerely hope that my talks and the telling of my story... will evoke kindness, tolerance and acceptance of diversity in other people, of whatever age they may be,” said Gabriele.
Born Gabriele Franziska Maria Weiss on November 10, 1926, in Vienna, she was the daughter of Josef Weiss and his wife Hildegard, who was Christian (although Gabriele found later in life that her maternal grandfather was Jewish).
Under Nazi race laws, she was classed as a mischling (half Aryan, half Jewish).
Following her mother’s death in 1935, she was sent to board at a convent school, but this was closed following the Anschluss with Germany.
Gabriele’s friends were all told which new schools they were to attend, but she was ordered to wear a yellow star and to attend a Jewish school. Prior to this, she had not known that her father was Jewish.
"This was the first time I realised that I was different to my friends,” she recalled.
“They were sent together to a school somewhere else in the district but I was singled out and made to stand to one side.
“I just couldn’t understand it or know what to make of it. I felt frightened and lost.”
From then, she was verbally and physically assaulted on her way to and from school, and she was now forbidden from entering the park to play with her friends by a sign declaring “Jude Verboten”.
Gabriele was one of 10,000 children to be accepted into the UK to ensure their safety as part of the Kindertransport programme.
Surrounded by Gestapo officers, she said goodbye to her grandmother and great-aunt at Westbahnhof in Vienna, with her grandmother saying: “We will soon see each other again.”
The train travelled from Vienna to the Hook of Holland, where the children boarded a boat for Harwich, England.
Ken and Gabriele Keenaghan on their wedding day in 1953 (Gabriele Keenaghan/AJR)[Missing Credit]
Gabriele was met there by Aileen Bagot from the Catholic Committee for Refugees, who kept in touch with her until the committee was dissolved years later.
Unable to communicate with each other due to the language barrier, Aileen escorted Gabriele from Harwich to Liverpool Street Station and then across London, where Gabriele was left to take the train to Aldershot on her own. Once there, she met her new foster parents.
Gabriele attended a Catholic primary school and learnt English quickly, but she recalled that her foster mother began to treat her poorly, making her do housework and punishing her if it was not done the way she wanted.
In January 1940, the Catholic Committee for Refugees moved Gabriele from Aldershot to Ashford, where she boarded at The Convent of Notre Dame.
However, in 1942, when she turned 16, her Austrian nationality saw her classified as an “enemy alien” and Ashford's status as a restricted coastal area meant she had to be moved again, this time to a convent in Mill Hill, north London, at the height of the Blitz, where she was able to take a training course in Nursery Nursing and Montessori education. Despite the bombing, Gabriele finished her training and went to work for the Richardson family in Woldingham, where she worked until after the war’s end.
Finally, she was able to communicate with her grandmother again, but she was unable to find any news of her father, and the Red Cross concluded that he had likely died in a concentration camp.
She has lived in the UK ever since, meeting her husband, Ken Keenaghan, an RAF navigator whom she married in 1953.
The couple had two daughters, Pat and Christine, before Ken died of liver cancer in 1991.
In 2009, Gabriele was invited to tell her story to a class of schoolchildren and, since then, she has taken on an active role as a Holocaust educator, receiving a British Empire Medal for her services to the field in 2019.
Gabriele’s full story can be read in her AJR MyStory book, available for free online.
