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I Seek a Kind Person

My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust

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I Seek a Kind Person

By: Julian Borger
Narrated by: Dyfrig Morris
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About this listen

An original, investigative audio memoir by the Guardian's Pulitzer prize-winning World Affairs Editor, Julian Borger, to uncover the secrets of his family history and how the Holocaust determined the fate of their lives.

'I SEEK A KIND PERSON WHO WILL EDUCATE MY INTELLIGENT BOY, AGED 11.'

In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out adverts 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.

Eighty-three years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the advert 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 adverts, 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.

I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping family memoir of grief, courage and hope, connecting us with multiple generations, distant continents and the hidden histories of our almost unimaginable past.

©2024 Julian Borger (P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
20th Century Biographies & Memoirs Germany Military

Critic Reviews

One extraordinary story after another... not only forensically well-researched but tender, evocative and deeply moving (Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist)
A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes)
Julian's book is profoundly affecting, part memoir, part detective story, part history, at once elegiac and fascinating, it is so deeply relevant for our times, I zipped through it withy the deepest personal interest (Philippe Sands, author of East West Street)

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