Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Julian Borger presents his memoir "I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust."
This program is held in recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) on April 24.
Registration requested, but not required.
About the book (from the publisher):
This gripping family memoir of grief, courage and hope tells the hidden stories of children who escaped the Holocaust, building connections across generations and continents.
In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death.
83 years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the ad that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life. Drawn to the shadows of his family’s past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper ads, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children, and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war.
From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.
About the author:
Julian Borger is the diplomatic editor for The Guardian. He covered the Bosnian War for the BBC and The Guardian, and returned to the Balkans to report on the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He has also served as The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent and its Washington bureau chief. Borger was part of the Guardian team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism for its coverage of the Snowden files on mass surveillance. He was also on the team awarded the 2013 Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) medal and the Paul Foot Special Investigation Award in the UK. Photo credit: Carlotta Luke.
Presented in partnership with the Historical Society of Princeton and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
