I Seek a Kind Person - My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
Julian Borger, John Murray, £20

JULIAN BORGER was 22 when his father Robert committed suicide. Many years later Borger decided to investigate his father’s background in order to achieve some understanding of what led him to take his own life.

The result of his research has been this book; a powerful synthesis of memoir, detective work into family mysteries and a narrative of the wider political events that impinged on the Borger family through the 20th century and which influenced their decision making.

Robert Borger was born into a comfortable bourgeois community of Viennese Jews who comprised over 50 per cent of the city’s doctors and dentists, 60 percent of its lawyers and who owned a quarter of its businesses. However, Hitler’s Anschluss in March 1938 brought an end to the fragile, illusory security of their life, not only for Jews but also for communists and socialists and some of Borger’s family were these too.

Robert’s father Leo was quick to see the writing on the wall and in what must have been an act of sheer desperation coupled with blind optimism he placed a small ad in the Manchester Guardian for a foster family to take Robert. At a shilling a line it read: “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy aged 11, Viennese of good family.
Borger 5/12 Hinterstrasse, Vienna 3.” 80 children, some as young as nine, were advertised similarly in the Manchester Guardian in 1938.

Why the Manchester Guardian? The two cities were linked by the textile trade and Manchester had the largest Jewish community in Britain outside London. Mike Fodor, the paper’s Austria correspondent, was himself a Hungarian Jew and the paper was seen as sympathetic to the plight of European Jews.

Once Borger discovered the advert relating to his father Robert, he began to research the seven other children in that day’s ads, uncovering stories of survival, both hair-raising and poignant. One child had been sent to a Bournemouth boarding school whose headmaster was not only a defrocked priest but a member of the Blackshirts. Some were treated as servants although Robert found a loving home with committed socialists in Caernarfon.

Borger devotes a whole chapter to his Aunt Malci, a staunch and lifelong communist who, with her stepson Mordechaj took the dangerous route of active resistance within occupied Europe.

One of the strengths of the book is the discussion of, firstly, the losses these uprooted children suffered, not only of family but of language, identity and security; and secondly, the different ways of trying to cope with this. This loss coupled with the feeling of survivor guilt led in many cases to lifelong trauma.

Robert was nervous and withdrawn when he arrived in Caernarfon and chose to shut the past down and assimilate. Borger says: “He did not discuss his childhood. That boy had been tidied away.” He became a serious and melancholic man who had the problem of many refugees: coming from two places but belonging to neither, which has led Borger to remark “part of me always felt we were somehow pretending.”

After his extensive research into the lives of his own family and those of the other advertised children, Borger concludes that while nothing could fully explain his father's death, he has a better awareness of the suffering and fear his father lived through, which left him lonely and unrooted. Borger says: “The real story of war is also the years that follow, all the days the wounded and bereaved survivors have to struggle through, only to bequeath the anguish to another generation.”

It is impossible to read this eloquent book without thinking of today’s refugees desperately seeking asylum from war and political turmoil, untethered, depending on the kindness of strangers.