‘I had known about these things in my head but not really known it in my heart and body, until I read these deeply-expressive accounts.' Photo: Book cover of I Seek a Kind Person
I Seek a Kind Person by Julian Borger
I Seek a Kind Person: My father, seven children and the adverts that helped them escape the holocaust, by Julian Borger. Review by Ruth Tod
The title of this new book is the first line of an advertisement that was placed in the tuition column of The Manchester Guardian in August 1938, by Leo and Erna Borger. The full advertisement read: ‘I Seek a kind person who will educate my Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse. Vienna 5.’
This was one of several advertisements written from Vienna by parents desperate to save their children from the Nazis. They knew the readers of this newspaper might be sympathetic, and that Manchester was the home of many Jewish refugees from earlier pogroms, so it was a good choice. Julian Borger’s own father, eleven-year-old Robert, was the boy in this particular ad. Robert never said much about himself, and his family was shocked when he committed suicide in 1983. Julian, who is the world affairs editor of the Guardian, decided to research and write about the struggles that some of those children had experienced, partly to help him understand his father better. His colleague Jonathan Freedland describes his book as ‘extraordinary… tender, evocative and deeply moving’.
We bought it as soon as it appeared, because both my husband, Mark, and I have connections with it. Robert Borger was taken in by Nans and Reg Bingley, two very kind teachers living in north Wales. Mark’s mother, herself a refugee from Germany, taught French at a school for refugees in Kent, and spent several summer holidays with the Bingleys, staying in touch with them for many years afterwards. My own mother left Vienna aged seventeen, to become an au pair, first with a Jewish family and then with Quakers who helped run a club for refugees and conscientious objectors in their local Meeting house.
Julian spent a long time trying to find children from the advertisements, and traced seven of them. Their experiences come alive as he weaves their stories together from their memoirs and the conversations he had with their descendants. Reading their stories has been a shock to me, because they showed me just how little my mother had told us. There are haunting scenes of Jews kneeling down to scrub pavements with toothbrushes, being kicked and laughed at, many wearing their best clothes as an act of defiance. Fathers were picked off at random and sent to Dachau, their ashes returned to the family. Children were chased through the streets, pelted with stones by their one-time classmates. I had known this with my head but not really known it in my heart and body, until I read their deeply-expressive accounts. My mother had refused to speak of that time, except to say it was awful. Maybe she had been protected by her blue eyes and red-blonde hair. But what had she seen and heard? I think she had forced herself to bury all that she had witnessed so deeply that no one would know. Once, she told me she could not allow herself to cry because she didn’t think she would be able to stop. Later, she wondered whether to ask for forgiveness from a priest, but she never pursued it and we could only guess at what she had been thinking.
Some of the subject’s accounts overlap, while others are strikingly different. One of the boys didn’t take up an offer from the paper and instead decided to go with his brother. His journey over the border to Holland was miraculous. It’s an amazing adventure, being looked after, then captured, and then escaping multiple times – in the end meeting up with his sweetheart from a camp and marrying her. One of the girls landed up in Shanghai, which had a large and prosperous Jewish population that could welcome refugees because no visas were required. Then the Japanese took control of the city and the Jews were interned. This is where my grandfather went but, like my mother, he never spoke about it, so learning what happened to them was another revelation.
For the other children, the welcome in Liverpool Street station was a huge relief, with police officers handing out comfort instead of abuse. Settling into a new home was not easy, and for those who were expected to be servants, life was very hard. Some children never saw their parents again, and discovered gradually that they had died in the camps. One of them wrote that she had become slowly orphaned.
Robert’s parents got out, but were unable to see him much because of the terms of their work contracts. The Bingleys helped Robert through school and university, always welcoming him home. When Nans heard about his death, she said that he was another of Hitler’s victims. Despite his academic success and his flourishing family around him, Robert never felt at peace with himself.
The value of these stories lies not only in exposing the facts but in the personal reflections. Those who went back to visit Vienna after the war felt that Austrians in general were in denial about their role, describing themselves as victims of the Nazis because they had been forced to bully and kill against their will. Not till many years later did Austria follow Germany in acknowledging what they had done. Many of the children who visited later said they were unmoved because, as one of them recounts, ‘she had wrapped Vienna and her past in silence’. This is spoken by Lis, the only one of all the children still living, who explained that it had taken years to come to terms with what had happened. There was ‘no sudden catharsis, but rather constant work’. I think the gradual move from denial to acceptance is what helped people to survive – victims and persecutors alike. In Germany and Austria it is still an ongoing process of reconciliation and healing.
In a recent interview with Jonathan Freedland, Julian Borger spoke briefly about the trauma inflicted by war that lies deeply within all those who participate in it, and about how easily this trauma can resurface by a prompt from the past. Several people in the stories have used therapy to let go and move on. From my own experience I think shame, guilt and fear can leave both the perpetrators and victims feeling unclean deep inside. Some try to cleanse themselves by tormenting other people, because they are not able to acknowledge the torment inside themselves, and so they project on to the other. The cycle of trauma and violence perpetuates itself.
In I Seek a Kind Person, Julian Borger helps us to see, through the eyes of individual children, how damage is inflicted and carried. We also see the welcome the children received, and the resilience that enabled them to make a new life for themselves in a new country. It tells a universal story that is both shocking and heart-warming.
