Holocaust Memorial Day: “How is it you speak German so well?”

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, my grandma's story of escape from Nazi-occupied Austria.
Joanna Kessler

Uncle Richard’s arrest changed everything. A Viennese banker, he had been deported to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938, for the crime of being a Jew. 

Since the Anschluss, life in Vienna had become dangerous. Jewish children were thrown out of school. For a period, parents set up special schools and escorted students there and back by a rota. After attacks on these convoys, it was deemed safer to stay at home.

Three weeks after Richard’s arrest, his niece, my grandmother, a nine-year-old girl named Inge Rubner, boarded a Kindertransport west-bound to London, a journey that would save her life. She was one of the lucky few. Millions of others also boarded trains — cattle carts, at gunpoint — bound for the death camps of the east.

She recounted her story to me again this year, ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday. It is an opportunity to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution and in genocides that followed; a call to never be complacent, to challenge the language of hatred.

Talking from the warmth and comfort of her north London home, the horror of war and displacement felt both distant and immediate. “My grandparents could not face the final parting,” she tells me. “But just before the train pulled out, I thought I heard my grandmother — ‘Viel gluck!’ [Good luck] To this day, I don’t know if that was her.”

Either way, she would never see her again. Before she was due to be deported to the east, her grandmother Bertha died of a heart attack. Her grandfather, also called Richard, threw himself from a window, one of thousands of Austrian Jews who chose to take their own lives before the Nazis could extinguish them.

Conditions on board were cramped. Of the seven young Jewish boys and girls who made the journey that day, two slept in bunks, another two on the floor. Inge slept on one of the luggage racks. 

They were accompanied by an English Quaker volunteer, the astonishingly well-named Miss Hope. Aged 19, Margaret Hope had travelled from London to Vienna, taking on significant personal risk.

My grandmother’s father, Karl, had given Inge four postcards – one to post at each stop: Munich, Aachen, Ostend and London, so that he could follow her progress. The young Inge, terrified and homesick, filled them all in at Aachen and posted them back.

“My poor father must have been very upset to get them all from Aachen. The whole idea was to make sure that I was safe.” It was only some days later he learned his daughter had made it to safety.

There are details that make the journey sound like nothing more than a school trip. The sandwiches and chocolate milk. But then, at the Belgian border, the train was shunted into a siding. Nazis boarded. 

“They asked for jewellery, so we gave them what we had. I was very scared. I knew what Germans could do. I’d seen them take Jews away at the flats where I lived. But they let us go. I still think about it.” 

Later, she discovered a bracelet her aunt had given her as a leaving gift. She was terrified. “Would the Germans find it? Would I be punished?” She subsequently disposed of it in a London bin.

Inge arrived in London as one of the first of 10,000 Jewish refugee children to escape Nazi-occupied Europe via the Kindertransport. She was nine and spoke little English. 

After the war, she obtained British citizenship through her father, who came to England in January 1939, having been warned that deportations were imminent. Even now, the pride in her voice is unmistakable. “I cannot tell you what a relief it was to receive English nationality. You never knew, were they suddenly going to say ‘we don’t want you any longer’? That had happened in other countries.” 

Aged 16, she adopted her middle name, Joanna, to avoid questions about the past, with which her relationship remains complicated. “When I am on the Continent and am asked ‘How is it you speak German so well?’, I cannot bring myself to answer truthfully,” she says. 

At the LSE, where she went to university, she met Willie Kessler — by chance a fellow Jewish Austrian refugee — to whom she would be married for 62 years. They had four sons, each named after kings of England.

My grandparents, like so many survivors, did not speak to their children about what had happened to them and their families. “Of course, years later, when they became aware, they asked, ‘Why did you not tell us?’ It’s a question we have never answered. It is a problem we have bequeathed to them.”

hmd.org.uk

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