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

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.”