I Seek a Kind Person
On sale
18th January 2024
Price: £10.99
Genre
Humanities / History / Regional & National History / European History
‘A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it’ EDMUND DE WAAL
‘Tender, evocative and deeply moving’ JONATHAN FREEDLAND
‘Profound, elegiac and fascinating . . . I zipped through it’ PHILIPPE SANDS
‘Compelling’ DAILY MAIL, BOOK OF THE WEEK
‘Terrifying and enthralling’ ALAN RUSBRIDGER
‘A touching, fascinating tribute to a father’ LITERARY REVIEW
In 1938, before Kindertransport, Jewish parents in Vienna took out adverts in the Manchester Guardian asking for people to take in their children – a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save them from the Nazis.
Eighty-three years later, Julian Borger discovers an advert for an ‘intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family’. It was his father, Robert. Like almost everything about his childhood, Robert had kept this a secret, until he took his own life.
Starting with nothing but the adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, forests and concentration camps in Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, he unearths the astonishing journeys and legacies of children left in the hands of fate – and at the mercy of other people’s kindness.
I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping story of grief, inheritance, courage and hope.
‘A gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma’ OBSERVER
‘Incredible . . . and so beautifully told’ HADLEY FREEMAN
‘Tender, evocative and deeply moving’ JONATHAN FREEDLAND
‘Profound, elegiac and fascinating . . . I zipped through it’ PHILIPPE SANDS
‘Compelling’ DAILY MAIL, BOOK OF THE WEEK
‘Terrifying and enthralling’ ALAN RUSBRIDGER
‘A touching, fascinating tribute to a father’ LITERARY REVIEW
In 1938, before Kindertransport, Jewish parents in Vienna took out adverts in the Manchester Guardian asking for people to take in their children – a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save them from the Nazis.
Eighty-three years later, Julian Borger discovers an advert for an ‘intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family’. It was his father, Robert. Like almost everything about his childhood, Robert had kept this a secret, until he took his own life.
Starting with nothing but the adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, forests and concentration camps in Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, he unearths the astonishing journeys and legacies of children left in the hands of fate – and at the mercy of other people’s kindness.
I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping story of grief, inheritance, courage and hope.
‘A gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma’ OBSERVER
‘Incredible . . . and so beautifully told’ HADLEY FREEMAN
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Reviews
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
Poignant beyond measure. In this dark telling, there is also light
Magnificent... a beautiful, heart-breaking, amazing book
Borger's splendid narrative is as much that of a world now vanished - Habsburg Vienna and the Jews of central and eastern Europe - as it is that of survivors and the terrible burden they carried
A family memoir, a collective biography and a gripping detective story rolled into one
A compelling story, desperately sad yet shot through with moments of selflessness, hope and kindness, and Borger skilfully weaves the different strands of the narrative together
This remarkable book in itself exemplifies the significance of facing up to and finding ways of living with an almost unbearable past
A touching, fascinating tribute to a father Borger remembered principally as a disciplinarian and an academic mentor but whose loneliness he finally came to understand
A gripping addition to the literature on inherited trauma
A universal story that is both shocking and heartwarming
One extraordinary story after another... not only forensically well-researched but tender, evocative and deeply moving
A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it
A compelling account of love, loss and great courage... Beautiful, powerfully told and deserving of the widest possible audience
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
Intensely moving... an utterly absorbing read
Remarkable stories told with love, insight and respect... This book is more than a poignant eulogy - it has important lessons for the modern era
An extraordinary book... a work of meticulous investigation... You may think you've read everything you need to about the Holocaust, but you haven't
Magnificent... One of the best books I have read on the "second generation" literature
Raw, unflinching and honest
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
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
A moving account of the life changing impact of acts of kindness to strangers in need... a salutary reminder for our own times
An astonishing, moving and unflinching work of courage