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 & 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.
