When Julian Borger’s father took his own life in London in 1983, his family assumed it was linked to recent events. Robert Borger, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, had been passed over for a promotion at work and, after an ultimatum from his wife, Wyn, about his infidelity, had walked out of the family home. But then Borger Jr telephoned Nancy Bingley, who lived in Caernarfon in Wales and had fostered Robert after he arrived from Austria in the late 1930s as a Jewish refugee. On hearing that he had killed himself, she said: “Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got to him in the end.”
Borger already knew of the circumstances of his father’s arrival in Britain. What he didn’t know was that his grandparents had advertised Robert in the classified ads of the Manchester Guardian. Following the 1938 Anschluss, Austrian Jews were looking for ways to escape the Nazis, who were stripping them of their livelihoods, destroying synagogues and fomenting hatred in the streets. Many advertised their services as butlers, nannies, housekeepers and chauffeurs, but when it came to their children they appealed directly to readers’ humanity. Leo and Erna Borger’s advert for their son read: “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family.” In just under a year, 60 children were advertised this way, the numbers tailing off once Britain’s Kindertransport scheme got under way.
In I Seek a Kind Person, Borger, a Guardian journalist, sets out not just to piece together his father’s story – Robert had shared little with his family about the trauma of his childhood – but to tell those of the other children advertised. “Their ads in the Manchester Guardian were like telegrams from another age: urgent and compressed, with no room for detail,” he notes. “They were abbreviations of other lives, which started off running parallel to [my] father’s before spinning off in different directions.”
The book is, then, a family memoir, a collective biography and a gripping detective story rolled into one. It is clear that, having had generous and loving hosts, Robert was one of the luckier children to have found a home through the classified ads. Borger tells of 18-year-old Liese, who became a maid to her host family and “who found only exploitation in Britain thinly dressed as charity”, and of Gertrude Batscha, who realised she had been taken in to make her host, Annie, look good among her friends at the Women’s Institute, and who was quickly put to work. When Gertrude received a letter after the war informing her that all her close relatives were dead, she “blacked out, unable to function, and had to be helped into bed where she stayed weeping for three days”.
Not all the children from the Manchester Guardian made it to Britain. The story of Fred Schwarz, advertised by his parents as a “Healthy Modest Viennese Boy”, and his older brother, Frits, has all the trappings of a Hollywood movie. After Frits was detained by a Nazi patrol and threatened with Dachau, their parents knew they couldn’t wait for a reply to their ad. What followed was an epic journey undertaken by the two brothers to Cologne and on to the Netherlands variously by car, motorbike, train and on foot. The pair spent the war in assorted internment camps including Westerbork, a Dutch holding camp near the German border, and, for several months, Auschwitz, where they were witness to the Nazi genocide. Incredibly, both lived to tell the tale.
Most of the children in the ads are now long dead, their tales of pain and displacement living on through their descendants, many of whom suffered their own inherited grief. Through his research, Borger gains a greater understanding of himself, his father and the trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors: how they can be undone by the weight of their loss and their guilt at having lived where others perished. He reveals how Jewish survival wasn’t necessarily a matter of resilience or blind luck. It could happen because an anxious parent saw the shifting political winds, put their faith in the kindness of strangers and placed an ad.
• I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust by Julian Borger is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
