MJH | Stories Survive: “I Seek A Kind Person” Book Talk

I Seek A Kind Person is a gripping family memoir of grief, courage, and hope that tells the hidden stories of children who escaped the Holocaust, building connections across generations and continents.

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

83 years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the ad 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 ads, 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.

Julian Borger is the Guardian’s senior international correspondent based in London. He covered the Balkan wars in the 1990’s and served as The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent in Jerusalem and in Washington as bureau chief and then global affairs editor. Borger was part of the Guardian team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism, for its coverage of the Snowden files on mass surveillance. He also won the 2016 One World Media press award for Syria’s Truth Smugglers, about the investigation of the war crimes of the Assad regime. Borger has written two books: The Butcher’s Trail (2016) about the manhunt for Balkan war crimes, and I Seek A Kind Person (2024) about Jewish children saved from the Nazis with the help of newspaper adverts.

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