Paper trail: How a series of ads in a WWII-era UK daily revealed a tragic family history

LONDON — After his step-grandmother’s death in 1998, Julian Borger began to unpack a box of mementos she had stored for him. Among his grandfather’s stamp albums and old banknotes were Nazi-era documents, gray-green Austrian passports stamped with a large red “J” for Jude, and a certificate from when Leo Borger was interned in the UK as an “enemy alien” after the outbreak of war in 1939.

But Borger, the world affairs editor of The Guardian newspaper, couldn’t connect the dots to paint a picture of the story they told.

Two decades later, Borger began a journey that would at last begin to shed light on his family’s painful past: its flight from Vienna after the Anschluss — the political union of Austria with Nazi Germany in 1938 — and the long shadow that would eventually contribute to his father’s suicide in the early 1980s.

“I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust,” published in the US this month, is both a moving family memoir and a powerful piece of investigative journalism.

But beyond the stories of the individuals lies a narrative crafted by Borger that explores the complexities of life for Jewish child refugees in Britain — a country that offered them a haven from likely death but also, for some, a somewhat chilly welcome.

It also underlines the terrible burdens that those children carried into adulthood, not just “the weight of loss and the guilt of survival,” but the deep-seated feelings of betrayal and distrust sparked by the manner in which friends, neighbors and fellow countrymen turned against them when the Nazis crossed the Austrian border in the spring of 1938 without a shot being fired.

Borger’s dive into his family’s history began in the closing weeks of US President Donald Trump’s first administration when, writing a piece about the deportation of West African asylum seekers, he suddenly recalled his mother telling him about a small advertisement his grandparents had placed in the Manchester Guardian in 1938.

Days later, an archivist at the paper (it became simply The Guardian in 1959) sent Borger a block of six short ads from August 3, 1938, in their “blotchy pre-war typeface,” one of which read: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse, Vienna 3.”

That “intelligent boy” was the author’s father, Robert. The ad, Borger writes, was “in a way, our origin story.”

Robert Borger was one of six Jewish children advertised in that day’s paper. As Borger began to look through the archives, he saw that scores of other Viennese parents, desperately seeking a place of refuge outside of the Third Reich for their children, had also placed ads. Indeed, in the months before the Kindertransport was initiated in the wake of Kristallnacht, newspaper ads were one of the few ways Jewish parents could get their children out of Austria.

Fascinated and driven by the memory of the box of his late grandfather’s mementos, Borger began the painstaking task of tracing some of them. While an online archive proved a critical resource, the search was often time-consuming and frustrating.

Many ads contained just the age and gender of the child, a surname, or simply initials and a street address in Vienna. In only a handful of cases was the child’s name given. Moreover, while some names could be traced through archives to Britain — and sometimes on to transatlantic crossings to New York — the trail would often run cold at that point. Refugees adopted more Anglo-Saxon names, married and changed their names, or died without descendants.

But, for all that, Borger’s patience, tenacity and reporting skills produced enough breakthroughs to uncover stories which mix tragedy, grief and heartbreak with joy, survival and resilience.

A skeleton of an origin story

Borger’s own family story was shrouded in secrecy. Robert rarely discussed his childhood with his wife and children, nor did his parents, Leo and Erna.

“We grew up aware of the bare skeleton of my father’s story,” writes Borger. Robert and his mother had escaped Vienna for Britain seven months after the Anschluss, with Leo following in March 1939. Erna’s visa as a maid — one of the few jobs which allowed refugees to gain entry to the country — and Leo’s as an agricultural trainee didn’t permit the couple to live together or with their son.

“Everything was opaque,” writes Borger. “It was a handful of details that told us what happened, but not how it happened and how it felt.”

Robert, who later became a university lecturer, shied away from his background. Borger says that as a typical teenager looking “for what distinguishes you [and] makes you special,” he was “curious” about his father’s past but “easily rebuffed” in the face of a wall of silence. With the family’s Jewish heritage “all but invisible,” Robert chose to assimilate: his children, for instance, were awarded quintessentially English middle-class names — Rupert, Makepeace and Sebastian.

“We had been secular as a family for so many generations,” Borger tells The Times of Israel in an interview. “That instinct to assimilate and to shed all the attributes of Judaism was kind of baked into my family.”

The impact of Robert’s reticence to discuss key elements of the family’s past was profound. “It was,” writes Borger, “as if we had painted layer after layer of tasteful off-white over the top of something garish, more visceral and unsettling.”

Slowly, however, Borger’s book chips away at the dull paintwork, revealing something unsettling but also much more interesting. Leo, Borger’s “quiet, frugal grandfather with string for a belt,” for instance, emerges “anew in heroic form.”

A World War I veteran and staunch member of the left-wing social democrats, he spotted the threat posed by the Nazis and acted on his fears long before many others: his Manchester Guardian advertisement for Robert was one of the first.

Borger discovered paperwork which shows his grandfather appealing to the war veterans’ association for protection in the days after the Nazi takeover: it resulted in a scribbled handwritten note which exempted his small radio business from having to display a sign designating it a “Jewish shop.” Ultimately, of course, it proved no protection. State archive correspondence shows Leo doggedly but unsuccessfully fighting for a pittance of compensation following the forced “Aryanization” of his shop.

Borger also paints a vivid portrait of Reg and Nancy Bingley, left-wing teachers from South Wales who answered Leo’s advertisement and provided his son with a home. Warm, highly educated but by no means wealthy, the couple were “an open tap of kindness that was never turned off.”

In his early days living with the couple, Robert’s fear was all-pervasive. They had, for instance, to remove the whistle from their kettle because it sounded like those used by the Brownshirts and Hitler Youth as they terrorized Jews back in Vienna. The Bingleys’ kindness, together with Nancy’s educational trips and Reg’s tutoring, allowed Robert to shine in the classroom, win a university scholarship and emerge with a first-class degree.

Filling in the blanks

As Borger writes, his father’s early life had always been “a blank space, a dark silhouette set against the backdrop of the 1930s.” But his research into the stories of other Jewish children who appeared in the Manchester Guardian ads helped provide some color, lighting up “at least an imagined version of what had been left undescribed in our lives.”

George Mandler, whose parents had placed an ad that appeared six days before Robert’s, turned out to have spent his childhood in the same Vienna neighborhood as Borger’s father and attended the same school. His memoir thus provided “a detailed telling of a parallel story.” Mandler describes the “cloud of anxiety and foreboding” that descended after the Anschluss, having classmates turn upon him and being kicked out of school.

What impact did this have on his 11-year-old father, Borger wonders.

“I believe that fear, of being spurned and disowned overnight by those he counted as friends just the day before, never left him,” he writes. “He would never again feel totally secure.”

Like Robert, Mandler, who was offered a place at an English private school, appeared to land on his feet. “Everybody is nice,” he said of his new school. There was no bullying, although he grumbled a little about the food.

Others, however, had a tougher time. Borger tracked down the children of Gerti Batscha (later Yehudith Segal) to their home in Moshav Nahalal in northern Israel and discovered that she wrote a memoir for her family. The middle-class English family who took Gerti in were very different from the Bingleys, showing little empathy and using her as a source of free labor in their home. Unlike some other families, they also did little to help Gerti as she struggled without success to secure her parents a job offer, visa and escape route from Vienna.

Nonetheless, Gerti recalled: “I have always felt nothing but gratitude towards them… For motives not quite clear, they, the goyim, made the necessary arrangements and saved a Jewish child.”

Thankfully, Gerti later found a family who treated her with respect and kindness, teaching her valuable skills and instilling an enthusiasm for Zionism and the Jewish homeland that would later lead her to a life in Israel.

Gerti looked back warmly on the country that had provided her with a home.

“England left its indelible mark on me and I believe it to be a beneficial mark. I liked the English people, whether Jews or Gentiles,” she wrote in her memoir. The rub, of course, was that the country didn’t also open its doors to her parents, who, like those of many other children, perished in the Holocaust.

“We’d be horrified now,” Borger says of the policy. “It was seen as a great act of generosity then, but it would [now be seen] as a child separation policy.”

Even when parents were able to join their children, they often found — as the Borgers did — the terms of their work visas separated them for prolonged periods.

As Borger writes, Britain provided “immediate safety, sustenance and a haven that was to prove remarkably resilient.” None of those who fled to the country — even those, like Gerti, who made their homes elsewhere — forgot the debt they owed it. But while it “was a sanctuary,” it was also sometimes “a bitter one.”

Leo, for instance, found himself interned on the Isle of Man for months when the Nazis’ rapid advance through Western Europe in the summer of 1940 led Churchill to order all fighting-age male “enemy aliens,” including refugees, be locked up. It was not a subject Leo ever discussed, perhaps regarding it, Borger speculates, “as a regrettable and temporary lapse on the part of the nation he saw as his savior.”

Many Britons justifiably retain a sense of pride regarding the country’s effort to save Jewish children on the eve of World War II. But, acknowledges Borger, “as you drill down and look more closely… in the detail, inevitably, it is a much more grainy, gray picture than viewed from afar.”

Extraordinary endurance – and some survival

Not all of the children whom Borger researched managed to escape to England. He uncovers the story of the teenage brothers Fred and Frits Schwarz, which turned into “one of the most extraordinary accounts of endurance and survival” he came across.

The pair escaped Austria for Amsterdam, were locked up for two years in the Westerbork transit camp after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, and, in the closing months of the war, survived Theresienstadt, deportation to Auschwitz, slave labor at Buchenwald and typhoid.

Borger also tells the remarkable story of Aunt Malci, Leo’s younger sister, who took a different road from her brother and chose to stay in Europe and resist the Nazis.

Malci and her stepson, Mordechaj, later joined an Austrian communist-linked French resistance cell centered on Lyon. Malci eventually spent two years hiding in a convent, while Mordechaj died of diphtheria after being jailed and tortured for months by the Gestapo. Malci’s later life — she was unable to return to her old apartment which had been Aryanized and struggled to get official recognition of her stepson’s heroic sacrifice as a member of the resistance — points to post-war Austria’s difficult and complex relationship with its Nazi past.

While Malci died in the mid-1990s convinced that her fellow Austrians would “never change,” Borger himself believes the mainstream of Austrian society has now “made that step towards recognition and acceptance of the reality of Austria’s role in the Holocaust.”

As Borger’s account make clear, even the “lucky” ones — the children who received positive responses to their parents’ adverts or those who later escaped on the Kindertransport — paid a heavy price for their country’s complicity in the Nazis’ crimes. Mandler, for instance, wrote of his generation being “robbed” of its adolescence.

Borger also recalls in the book Nancy Bingley’s reaction when he had to call her in September 1983 to tell her that his father had committed suicide.

“Robert was the Nazis’ last victim,” she responded. “They got him in the end.”

Does Borger share her assessment? While acknowledging the “dark and opaque” nature of suicide, he recognizes his father’s childhood contained trauma that he never sought to deal with.

“Even though he was a psychologist, he never turned it on himself. My dad was very reluctant to look inwards and stuck with the protection of being an English academic without any background,” Borger says.

Writing the book, he discovered a significant detail from his father’s final days. After leaving the family home for the last time, Robert drove to Wales to see Nancy. The visit was unannounced and she was not at home.

“I find it so striking that… in the end, his last act was to go and find her and seek her out even though she was not in our day-to-day lives,” Borger says. “That is the strongest piece of evidence that there was something there, that his instinct was to go back to those origins.”

Borger’s research also led him to realize that the family’s silence about its past had allowed him to grow up erroneously thinking it had “miraculously survived the Holocaust without loss.” In fact, those who had perished — his grandmother’s sister and father, step-grandmother’s first husband, and Malci’s stepson — were simply not talked about.

“I think it’s horrendous to contemplate that we should have been so forgetful as a generation and as a family,” he says. “The things that my great aunt and her son went through would have been entirely forgotten. I’m so grateful that events conspired quite coincidentally… that allowed me to begin to do justice to that generation and the sacrifices they made.”

Amid this dark tale, there are, however, shards of light in the form of those Britons who opened their homes to Jewish children. The Bingleys “and all those who welcomed refugees from the Nazis and provided them with shelter, were as much evidence of that ‘finest hour’ as the Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain,” Borger writes.

Perhaps most importantly, Borger’s book also provides the Jewish parents who made the excruciating decision to send their sons and daughters away to safety — not knowing when, or if, they would ever see them again — with the acknowledgment they have frequently been denied.

They, one of their children says, are “the unsung heroes of our history”; so often seen simply as victims, in reality, they were saviors.