I Seek a Kind Person
My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
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.
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.
