Posted on March 8, 2023
The UK ambassador recently discovered her own grandmother escaped on the Kindertransport
A plaque honouring the memory of British officials and Anglican clergy who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis was unveiled at the British embassy in Vienna.
The ceremony was led by Lord Pickles, the government’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues and co-chair of Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Foundation, and the president of the Austrian parliament Wolfgang Sobotka.
The diplomats and clergy went into action after the Anschluss of March 1938 when Hitler’s troops annexed Austria.
It was an emotional morning at the embassy for Britain’s ambassador to Austria, Lindsay Skoll, who told attendees she had often found herself close to tears reading the accounts of those whom British diplomats and clergymen had tried to save.
Lord Eric Pickles and president of the Austrian parliament Wolfgang Sobotka unveiling the plaque (Photo: Richard Pobaschnig)
Ms Skoll discovered only recently that she herself was the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Her grandmother, born in Germany, found sanctuary in Vienna as a child before making it out on one of the last Kindertransport trains, settling in the north-east of England. Her grandmother kept this a secret until almost the very end of her life.