I SEEK A KIND PERSON: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust, by Julian Borger
In October 1938, soon after Robert Borger arrived at the Welsh home of his new foster parents, a teacher friend of theirs offered to take the 11-year-old refugee for a walk. “He went along, pale and trembling,” his son Julian Borger writes, reconstructing his father’s early days in Britain after a fraught exit from Austria. Robert Borger admitted later that he had been sure the man intended to kill him.
His foster parents, the Bingleys, removed their teakettle’s whistle, as the sound reminded Bobby of the violent mobs of SA Brownshirts and Hitler Youth who had recently chased him through Vienna’s streets. Borger’s riveting book is filled with such vivid details, as he recounts seven Jewish children’s escapes from Austria after the Anschluss, “the original catastrophe” in their lives, when Hitler’s troops marched into their country and were met with ecstatic crowds welcoming the new regime. Through painstaking research the author, a Guardian writer and editor, has traced the paths of his young subjects, whose parents placed ads in the same paper, then called The Manchester Guardian, in the hopes of finding British sponsors.
Borger’s book has a personal angle. It was only in 2021 that, seeking to explore his father’s history, he first read the following words in the Aug. 3, 1938, archive: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse, Vienna 3.”
The tragedy that opens Borger’s narrative is not, however, Kristallnacht or Robert’s own father being sent to Dachau; it is, rather, Robert’s death by suicide in 1983.
As Julian and his family reel, it falls to him as the eldest sibling to make some of the necessary calls. When he reaches Nans Bingley, who continued to be “a kind, calm, grandmotherly presence” in their lives, her response is stark: “Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got him in the end.”
Decades later, the author recalls that perceptive remark as he uncovers episodes from Robert’s early years, the Nazi theft of his father’s successful business and Robert’s subsequent train departure with his mother, who found a position in England as a domestic servant.
Borger’s painstaking search for others listed in the ads leads him to correspondents in Israel and California, New York and the Netherlands. Folding in these other experiences, largely gleaned from exchanges with the survivors’ children, broadens and deepens Borger’s poignant account.
These heartbreaking ads — “FERVENT prayer in great distress. Who would give a Home to a grammar school scholar aged 13: healthy, clever, very musical” — appeared amid the mundane surround of a daily newspaper. Like all the ads, a Boy called Fred’s “was on the second page, alongside the listener’s guide to radio programs, which that day included some new film music by Arthur Bliss.” (This was before the lifesaving Kindertransport, started in November 1938; throughout “I Seek a Kind Person,” the reader is reminded of an earlier Britain, which took to its post-imperial heart the mission of rescuing at least some asylum seekers.)
Each harrowing story has its own specific surprises of circumstance or geography. We’re taken as far afield as Shanghai, the outpost of resilient Jewish refugees who established a “Little Vienna” loosely governed by the Japanese, until the Nazis arrived to turn the place into a ghetto.
There are those whose ads did not yield placements, but who were able to attain a visa for the United States. One teenager named Gertrude, who was passed repeatedly among foster families in Britain, later wrote agonizingly about “a slow orphanhood,” the period of uncertain years during which she hoped to be reunited with her beloved parents. Their deaths were confirmed only at war’s end, when Gertrude received a letter from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Encountering Holocaust stories, we never lose the primal shock of the before scenes of normalcy and thriving, contrasted with the after of danger, threat, flight, loss. Perhaps this form crystallizes how possible such catastrophic change always is; certainly it is employed by countless dramas, including Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt,” whose Viennese characters and their fates have several echoes in these pages.
Julian Borger’s haunting, revelatory book exists in the shadow of a parent who, like many survivors, spoke little about his past. Part of Borger’s task is to illuminate that anguishing tension between forgetting and remembering.
As Gertrude, who later became Yehudith and moved to Israel, expressed it in a line Borger uses as his epigraph: “I feel as though half of me is fighting the other half by trying to forget, rather than remember, and I realize that is probably what I have been doing all my life.”
I SEEK A KIND PERSON: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust | By Julian Borger | Other Press | 304 pp. | Paperback, $17.99
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