'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.
