In 1938, as the horrifying implications of Nazi rule began to sink in for the Jews of central Europe, mothers and fathers all over the continent began scrabbling for desperate solutions to save their children – and, sometimes, themselves.
Besides the apparently endless queuing for visas at different Western embassies and consulates, there was another possibility: persuading good-hearted families, in countries opposed to Nazism, to foster or adopt their children. And this was done, as we learn from Julian Borger’s stunning and emotionally disturbing book, through classified advertising. Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, is the son of one of these advertised children. At the age of 11, his father, Robert Borger, was taken in by a remarkable couple, Nans and Reg Bingley, who on seeing an advert in the Manchester Guardian, brought him to their home in Wales and gave him a base which lasted for the rest of his life.
But in a shocking opening to his book, I Seek A Kind Person – the phrase Robert Borger’s parents used to ask for help – Julian Borger writes of his father’s suicide, and Nans’ verdict: “Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got to him in the end”.
The Guardian, of course, was not the only place in which anguished Austrian, German and Czech Jews advertised. A large number took out classified adverts in The Jewish Chronicle during the late 1930s, with highly educated couples offering their services as domestic servants – when they had no qualifications in such fields.
Professors claimed to be adept at gardening while women with medical qualifications, but almost no English, lied and declared themselves to be housekeepers or maids, when in truth their only experience was employing such women, rather than being able to cook and clean themselves. Hundred of Viennese Jews took out adverts in the somewhat misleading “Tuition” section of the Manchester Guardian
Julian Borger’s grandfather, Leo, advertised his son, Robert, or Bobby, on August 3 1938, telling readers that he was “an intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family”.
Unusually, both of Robert’s parents, Leo and his then wife, Erna, survived the Holocaust. Julian Borger traces the multiple disruptions and detours in his grandparents’ journey, from middle-class comfort in Vienna to an improbable second-life existence in Shrewsbury, where Leo wound up working in the Silhouette lingerie company as a cutter, and divorced from Erna who wanted to return to post-war Austria.
Leo later re-married. Robert Borger’s four children – Julian, his sister and two brothers, plus an unexpected half-brother from his father’s long affair – knew only a skeleton outline of what had happened to their father. Had it not been for a “chance exchange”, Borger would probably never have even begun his often painful research.
But, as he records: “In December 2020, I was writing a story about the blanket deportation of West African asylum seekers, particularly Cameroonians, in the dying months of Donald Trump’s turbulent administration. I began corresponding with a retired law professor called Ruth Hargrove, who was trying to stop the deportations of some of the Cameroonians on the grounds that they were quite possibly being sent to their deaths in the midst of a brutal civil conflict.”
Hargrove observed: “We keep living the same trauma. My father escaped from Vienna in 1938, just after the Gestapo took over. My mother’s family escaped the pogroms of Odessa in 1906… My parents’ wounds never healed.”
This was the trigger for Julian Borger to look into the advert his grandparents had taken out on his father’s behalf, discovering that Ruth’s grandparents had also taken out an advert in the Manchester Guardian.
My copy of I Seek A Kind Person is littered with Post-It markers as Borger sets out some of the facts and figures of the Holocaust in an absorbing and emotional display. Two shocking facts struck me like a hammer. First, the appalling frequency of suicides by Viennese Jews in particular: 500 suicides were reported in the Jewish community in the first two months after the Anschluss, the March 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. Second, Julian Borger’s decision to take out Austrian citizenship as an adult.
About 15 years ago I visited Vienna on a press trip at the invitation of the city authorities and was shown around by a municipal guide. One of the participants was the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, Ari Rath. Fed up with the guide’s scripted and cleaned-up offerings, Rath dug his heels in when we got to a city centre junction. As Borger records several times during the course of his book, Viennese Jews were repeatedly humiliated by the Nazis and were indeed made to scrub the streets with toothbrushes.
“Up there,” said Rath, pointing to an apartment block, “was my bedroom. And down here” — pointing to the pavement – “is where we had to scrub the streets.”
So thank heavens for the goodness of Nans and Reg Bingley, and how tragic that Julian’s father was never able to escape the legacy of being a Viennese Jew.
I Seek A Kind Person
by Julian Borger
John Murray, £20
