I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
Description
Description
This gripping family memoir of grief, courage, and hope tells the hidden stories of children who escaped the Holocaust, building connections across generations and continents. In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. 83 years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the ad that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life. Drawn to the shadows of his family's past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper ads, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children, and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.
About the Author
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. His book The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt was published by Other Press in 2017.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Moving...A family memoir, a collective biography, and a gripping detective story rolled into one." --The Guardian "Powerful...compelling...a gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma." --The Observer "This remarkable book in itself exemplifies the significance of facing up to and finding ways of living with an almost unbearable past." ―Financial Times "When Borger, a journalist, discovered a series of personal ads placed in The Manchester Guardian seeking refuge for Austrian Jewish children in the years before the Holocaust, it sent him on a quest to learn more about these desperate pleas, one of which saved his father from Nazi-occupied Vienna. He tracks down the life stories of seven of these children, and in the process unlocks the mystery of his distant, deceased father." --New York Times Book Review "The stories [Borger] has been able to salvage are remarkable threads connecting the present to a dark past, marked by the will to survive. Intriguing and humane, a worthwhile addition to Holocaust studies." --Kirkus Reviews "Borger fills out the historical context with great clarity...These losses were 'unmentionable, ' a heavy burden growing heavier and darker the more it was ignored. At the same time, those who lived told tales shot through with the joy of survival, the wonder of escape and the lives it made possible." --Times Literary Supplement "[Borger's] ability to piece together so many different stories is remarkable...[He] shows great curiosity, tenacity, and compassion as he interviews survivors and their descendants." --Jewish Book Council "Part memoir, part detective story...profoundly affecting." --Philippe Sands, author of East West Street "Tender, evocative, and deeply moving." --Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World "Powerful, eloquent...I loved it." --Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Other Press (NY)
Pub date:
2025-04-15
Length:
304 pages
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