I Seek a Kind Person cover art

I Seek a Kind Person

My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust

Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

I Seek a Kind Person

By: Julian Borger
Narrated by: Dyfrig Morris
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

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.

©2024 Julian Borger (P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
20th Century Europe Germany Military Modern War Holocaust Judaism Survival Imperialism

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Boy from Block 66 cover art
Finding Margaret cover art
Five Chimneys cover art
Auschwitz #34207 cover art
An Officer, Not a Gentleman cover art
Three Times a Countess cover art
The Brothers of Auschwitz cover art
Crooked Cross cover art
Sunshine and Laughter cover art
On the Run in Nazi Berlin cover art
In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality cover art
The River Is Waiting (Oprah's Book Club) cover art

Critic reviews

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)
All stars
Most relevant
Very moving - but unsentimental - exploration of the lives of eight Viennese children (including the author's father) who were sent away to safety from the Nazis, and the fate of the families they left behind.
The narration is perfect. A highly recommended listen.

This is an incredibly well researched, and extremely powerful book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Views into the tragic truth of lives damaged (and more) and the love shown by the innocent introduced

Life stories from tragic times

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

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.

Wonderful audible book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

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.

Incredibly moving, honest and informative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I liked and was moved by this superb and timely book. We must never forget.

Reawoke emotions about my own history.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews