I Seek a Kind Person
My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
'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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Violence is often just the beginning," writes Guardian editor Borger (The Butcher's Trail) in this heartbreaking family memoir. "The real story is also the years and decades that follow, all the days the wounded and bereaved survivors have to struggle through, only to bequeath the anguish to another generation." Searching for answers about the 1983 suicide of his father and still angry about the impact it had on his childhood, Borger was surprised to discover that Jewish children living in Nazi-occupied countries, among them his father, were advertised in the Guardian in the 1930s by parents hoping to send them to safety in Britain. In an effort to understand his father's state of mind, Borger tracks down the seven other children listed on the same classifieds page as him. What he finds are harrowing stories of desperation and guilt. "These children had arrived as young teens in Britain bearing the responsibility of having to save their mothers and fathers through the bureaucratic machinery of a new country, in a foreign language," Borger writes. Often their efforts were fruitless, and they had to cope with survivors' guilt after losing their entire families. Eventually, Borger begins to forgive his father: "The writing of this book unearthed my resentment of him but also brought its antidote." It's a unique and deeply moving exploration of the generational trauma left in the Holocaust's wake.
