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.
