Julian Borger: I Seek a Kind Person

This gripping family memoir of grief, courage, and hope 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 World Affairs Editor, based in Washington. He covered the Bosnian War for the BBC and the Guardian and returned to the Balkans to report on the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He has also served as the Guardian’s Middle East correspondent and its Washington Bureau Chief. 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. His book The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt was published by Other Press in 2017. His most recent work I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust has been published by Other Press in the Spring of 2025.

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