Gabriele Keenaghan was just 12 years old when she stood on a platform at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station in April 1939, said goodbye to her grandmother, and boarded a train that would take her away from Nazi Austria forever. Now 100 years old and living in North Shields, she is preparing to go back.
The journey was part of the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain in the months before the Second World War broke out. For Gabriele, it was the last time life felt anything close to normal.
‘I was apprehensive and I was worried because Nazis in black uniforms were on the platform,’ she recalled. ‘I was only 12 years old so I think they were frightening. Terrifying.’
One thing she has never forgotten is the strict rule that day: no tears. Children were told not to cry, no matter what. So when she hugged her grandmother goodbye on that platform, she held it together. She had to.
Now, more than eight decades later, Gabriele is getting ready to return to that same station. She knows it is not going to be easy. ‘I’ll probably feel emotional,’ she said simply.
The Kindertransport ran between December 1938 and September 1939, following the horrors of Kristallnacht, when Nazi forces carried out a wave of violent attacks on Jewish communities across Germany and Austria. Jewish organisations in Britain lobbied the government hard to open its doors to child refugees, and eventually the British parliament agreed to allow unaccompanied children in, provided they had a guarantee of financial support.
For many of those children, the train journey was the last time they ever saw their parents. Some families were later murdered in concentration camps. Others survived but were separated for years. The children who made it to Britain built new lives, often with foster families or in hostels, learning a new language and trying to make sense of a world that had turned on them.
Gabriele was one of the lucky ones in that she survived and eventually settled in England, making her home in North Shields in the north east of the country. She has lived there for many years now, and at 100 years old she remains sharp and willing to share her story, something she clearly feels matters deeply.
Her decision to go back to Vienna is a significant one. The Westbahnhof station still stands, though it has been modernised over the years. For Gabriele, walking back through those doors will mean confronting memories she has carried for nearly her entire life. The platform where she last saw her grandmother. The black uniforms. The silence where tears should have been.
Kindertransport survivors have become increasingly important voices in recent years as the generation that lived through the Second World War grows smaller. Their accounts offer a direct, human connection to a period of history that can otherwise feel distant or abstract, particularly for younger generations.
Gabriele’s story is a reminder of what the Kindertransport actually meant in practice. It was not an abstract policy or a historical footnote. It was a 12-year-old girl standing on a train platform, terrified, holding back tears, watching her grandmother disappear as the train pulled away.
She made it to Britain. She built a life. And now, at 100, she is going back to face that platform one more time.