I Seek a Kind Person

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What to expect

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.

(P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critics Review

One extraordinary story after another not only forensically well-researched but tender, evocative and deeply moving

Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist

A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it

Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes

Julian’s book is profoundly affecting, part memoir, part detective story, part history, at once elegiac and fascinating, it is so deeply relevant for our times, I zipped through it withy the deepest personal interest

Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

Incredible… and so beautifully told. One of those books that reminds you that great sweeps of history are made up of individual human lives, as real and hopeful as any of us

Hadley Freeman

A compelling account of love, loss and great courageBeautiful, powerfully told and deserving of the widest possible audience

Fergal Keane, author of The Madness

A terrifying and enthralling dissection of Europe’s greatest crime. Part memoir, part detective story – Borger ensures we know the full horror of the Holocaust, through his own family’s experience. This work is a crucial part of the Holocaust testimonies – a dark story which we need to keep front and centre

Alan Rusbridger

A moving account of the life changing impact of acts of kindness to strangers in need… a salutary reminder for our own times

Martin Sixsmith, author of The Lost Child of Philomena Lee

Poignant beyond measure. In this dark telling, there is also light

Lyse Doucet

Intensely moving an utterly absorbing read

Fiona Hill, author of There Is Nothing for You Here

Remarkable stories told with love, insight and respect… This book is more than a poignant eulogy – it has important lessons for the modern era

David Miliband

An extraordinary booka work of meticulous investigation You may think you’ve read everything you need to about the Holocaust, but you haven’t

Lindsey Hilsum, author of In Extremis

MagnificentOne of the best books I have read on the “second generation” literature

Christophe Boltanski, author of The Safe House

Raw, unflinching and honest

Baroness Arminka Helic of Millbank, former Special Advisor to the UK Foreign Secretary

An astonishing, moving and unflinching work of courage

David Rohde, author of In Deep

A book for anyone interested in social history and the nature of humanity… It brings a sweeping slice of history down to the very personal, the story of a father, of the decency of ordinary people. It shows that if people are given a start in life and a bit of security they can achieve great things, even in the face of terrible emotional damage

Mick Lynch

Magnificent… a beautiful, heart-breaking, amazing book

Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control

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