In 1938, Jewish families were scrambling to get out Vienna. In desperation, children were advertised in the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death.

I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped them Escape the Holocaust is a powerful and personal investigative memoir of survival and loss, spanning generations within families shaped by the long shadow of history.

In 2021, Julian Borger discovered that his father, Robert, was the ‘intelligent boy, aged eleven’ in an advert featured in the Manchester Guardian, a revelation that leads to a global investigation into the secrets of his family’s past and the remarkable stories of the other advertised children. Travelling to Vienna and his father’s foster home in Caernarfon, Wales, he retraces Robert’s escape, whilst searching for the other children and their family members, unearthing unpublished memoirs that reveal what happened after the adverts were placed to escape the Nazis.

From Viennese archives to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, forests and concentration camps in Germany, escape routes and refugee hostels in Holland, a secret Austrian cell within the French Resistance, and a surprising discovery in New York, Borger follows a kaleidoscope of lives at the mercy of the hands of fate, uncovering unbelievable stories from around the world and revelations about members of his own family.

About the Author
Julian Borger is the Guardian’s World Affairs Editor and was part of the team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Snowden files. He was also awarded an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) medal in 2013, the Paul Foot Special Investigation Award and the One World Media Press Award in 2016 for a feature story on war crimes in Syria.