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I Seek a Kind Person
- My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
- Narrated by: Dyfrig Morris
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
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Summary
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.
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What listeners say about I Seek a Kind Person
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- Kate
- 31-01-24
Incredibly moving, honest and informative
As the grandchild of an Austrian Jewish immigrant to England in the late 1930s, this sometimes difficult to listen to book gave me a stronger connection to my Oma through the stories told here about children and teenagers forced to leave their homes. She didn't speak about her life in Vienna much, although there were some glimpses here and there, and for me it felt this book filled a lot of the missing parts in, even if it wasn't her story. Every emotion and every kind of humanity is here, beautifully written and narrated. Each story is small but also impossibly big, and this is the kind of history we need so that we never forget the true impact of what happens to persecuted peoples. This isn't just our past, it's our present too.
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- Kate Incledon
- 03-02-24
A beautifully told and deeply difficult story
This was such a difficult book because of its subject matter and I sometimes had to pause for a lighter interlude but it is part of history that should never be allowed to be forgotten. This a beautifully written book, with a voice given to all those forgotten children that made it out of Austria.
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- Jackie
- 14-02-24
Life stories from tragic times
Views into the tragic truth of lives damaged (and more) and the love shown by the innocent introduced
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- Felix Seiler
- 06-02-24
Reawoke emotions about my own history.
I liked and was moved by this superb and timely book. We must never forget.
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- Petrova
- 24-06-24
Very moving
This is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read for a long time - though maybe ‘enjoyable’ is not quite the right word here. It was a fascinating account of the writer’s determined search for news of what had happened to some children sent away from Vienna to the safety of the UK before World War Two. The writer’s personal stake in what he discovered made the book all the more moving.
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- Sheila
- 08-08-24
Wonderful audible book
This audible book was very, very interesting. Julian Borger's words are easy to listen to and he gives a good account of the Viennese children whose parents wrote an advert in the Manchester Guardian seeking foster parents for their children in Britain. Not one of the people whose names were mentioned in this book should be forgotten even though their stories are just a drop in the ocean of the 6 million and more stories from the Holocaust. I think it's a great achievement for Julian and he has honoured the people in his book as well as his own family. I would recommend this audible book and will never forget the stories of the people in it. May their memories be a blessing.
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