I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
Jan 2024 · Hachette UK
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About this ebook
'A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it' EDMUND DE WAAL
'Tender, evocative and deeply moving' JONATHAN FREEDLAND
'Profound, elegiac and fascinating . . . I zipped through it' PHILIPPE SANDS
'Compelling' DAILY MAIL, BOOK OF THE WEEK
'Terrifying and enthralling' ALAN RUSBRIDGER
'A touching, fascinating tribute to a father' LITERARY REVIEW
In 1938, before Kindertransport, Jewish parents in Vienna took out adverts in the Manchester Guardian asking for people to take in their children - a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save them from the Nazis.
Eighty-three years later, Julian Borger discovers an advert for an 'intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family'. It was his father, Robert. Like almost everything about his childhood, Robert had kept this a secret, until he took his own life.
Starting with nothing but the adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, forests and concentration camps in Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, he unearths the astonishing journeys and legacies of children left in the hands of fate - and at the mercy of other people's kindness.
I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping story of grief, inheritance, courage and hope.
'A gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma' OBSERVER
'Incredible . . . and so beautifully told' HADLEY FREEMAN
'Tender, evocative and deeply moving' JONATHAN FREEDLAND
'Profound, elegiac and fascinating . . . I zipped through it' PHILIPPE SANDS
'Compelling' DAILY MAIL, BOOK OF THE WEEK
'Terrifying and enthralling' ALAN RUSBRIDGER
'A touching, fascinating tribute to a father' LITERARY REVIEW
In 1938, before Kindertransport, Jewish parents in Vienna took out adverts in the Manchester Guardian asking for people to take in their children - a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save them from the Nazis.
Eighty-three years later, Julian Borger discovers an advert for an 'intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family'. It was his father, Robert. Like almost everything about his childhood, Robert had kept this a secret, until he took his own life.
Starting with nothing but the adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, forests and concentration camps in Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, he unearths the astonishing journeys and legacies of children left in the hands of fate - and at the mercy of other people's kindness.
I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping story of grief, inheritance, courage and hope.
'A gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma' OBSERVER
'Incredible . . . and so beautifully told' HADLEY FREEMAN
Ratings and reviews
5.0
1 review
About the author
Julian Borger is the Guardian's World Affairs Editor, based in Washington. He covered the Bosnian war for the BBC and the Guardian and returned to the Balkans to report on the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He has also served as the Guardian's Middle East correspondent and its Washington Bureau Chief.
Borger was part of the Guardian team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism, for its coverage of the Snowden files on mass surveillance. He was also in the team awarded the 2013 Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) medal and the Paul Foot Special Investigation Award in the UK. He won the One World Media Press Award in 2016 for a feature story on the investigation of war crimes in Syria.
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