Patrick Comerford
Gabriele Keenaghan is a Holocaust survivor and former Kindertransport child who escaped from Vienna on the eve of World War II. She has been decorated for her services to Holocaust education and regularly tells her story in the hope of bringing ‘kindness, tolerance and acceptance of diversity’ to others.
The retired head teacher now lives in North Shields and is one of the oldest survivors of the Shoah to have been evacuated from Nazi-occupied Europe by the Kindertransport. This week she is marking the approach of her 100th birthday by returning to Vienna where she was born in 1926.
I began this occasional blog series, ‘Tales of the Viennese Jews,’ in November 2019. I last returned to this theme earlier this year (16 January 2026) following the death of Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor, author, and step-sister of Anne Frank. A year earlier (7 February 2025), I told the stories of Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025), the archetypal ‘wild child’ of the 1960s, and of her mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991), a self-styled baroness who resisted the Nazis in Austria.
This occasional series takes its title from the Tales from the Vienna Woods, a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written more than a century and a half ago in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised a Roman Catholic, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for his music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Strauss family’s Jewish identity.
However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of these stories are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz. Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two postings, I decided after visiting Vienna to re-tell some of these stories through this series, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.
The Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle reported earlier this week how Gabriele Keenaghan, a Kindertransport centenarian, is returning to Vienna. She was born Gabriele Franziska Maria Weiss in Vienna on 10 November 1926, an only child who did not even know she was Jewish until after the Nazis invaded Austria.
Her father Josef Weiss was Jewish and manufactured heating stoves. Her mother Hildegard was a Catholic. Family photographs show her as an only child with her parents, and include photographs with her parents in Berlin and visits to the Vienna Woods with her great-aunt Maria who was also her godmother.
After her mother died suddenly in 1935, Gabriele was brought up by her grandmother, also called Gabriele. She never knew her father was Jewish until after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in the Anschluss on 12 March 1938. She was a boarder at a Catholic convent school when the Nazis came and told the girls they would all be moving.
She was labelled a mischling, a pejorative term meaning ‘mixed’. ‘I was the only one left standing,’ she recalled in an interview with Mark Brown of the Guardian, and she wondered: ‘What’s happening to me?’ She was told she would have to go to a Jewish school and have a yellow star of David sewn on to her coat.
‘They called me “a dirty little Jew” … it was upsetting.’ But, she recalls, ‘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.’
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’.
The events of Kristallnacht on 9-10 November 1938 came on the eve of her 12th birthday. Gabriele never saw her father again: he was deported to Łódź in Poland and she believes he either died in the ghetto or was sent to be murdered in Auschwitz.
Her grandmother made arrangements for her to be taken out of Austria on a Kindertransport, the scheme that brought about 10,000 Jewish children to Britain as refugees.
She was still only 12 when she said goodbye to her grandmother and left on a train with 150 other children. They arrived the Netherlands, and from there they were sent by boat to Harwich and on to Liverpool Street station in London.
Gabriele quickly learned English and in January 1940 the Catholic Committee for Refugees moved her from Aldershot to Ashford, where she boarded at the Convent of Notre Dame. When she turned 16 In 1942, she was classified as an ‘enemy alien’ because of her Austrian nationality. She was moved again to a convent in Mill Hill, north London, and then trained in nursery nursing and Montessori education.
One of her first jobs was as a nanny to the Richardson family in Woldingham, Surrey. She has vivid memories of sheltering in air raid shelters during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941 and of VE Day, standing in front of Buckingham Palace.
After World War II, she studied at a teacher training college, and later became headmistress of a school in Newcastle. She met her husband, John ‘Ken’ Keenaghan, an RAF navigator with an Irish Catholic background and stationed in Bedford. They married in 1953 and raised their family in Wallsend. Later she became a middle-school head teacher and has fond memories of her career, the children and her teacher colleagues.
She returned to Austria each year to see relatives, especially her grandmother, who died in 1974.
She is now 99 and her actual 100th birthday is not until November. But she is marking her birthday a little early this year, returning this week with several generations of her family, including her daughters Pat and Christine to Westbahnhof, the train station she left Vienna from almost 90 years ago.
She continues to share her frightening and terrifying childhood experiences and has spoken many times to children about her experiences. ‘I hope they have learned something from it,’ she said this week. ‘But do we ever learn? Look at the world, look at the state it is in now.’
Gabriele Keenaghan told her story in a short book, My Story Gabriele Keenaghan BEM, published by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) in 2021 (here).
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Tales of the Viennese Jews:
1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’
2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean
3, portraits of two imperial court financiers
4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis
5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist
6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle
7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions
8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen
9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’
10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents
11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist
12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna
13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew
14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna
15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship
16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.
17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.
18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.
19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.
20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.
21, Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) and her mother Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991)
22, Eva Geiringer Schloss (1929-2026), step-sister of Anne Frank
23, Gabriele Keenaghan, survivor of the Kindertransport
