John Murray buys Borger's memoir on his family's experience of the Holocaust

John Murray will publish the investigative family Holocaust memoir by Julian Borger, a Pulitzer prize-winning Guardian editor.

Kate Hewson, publishing director at John Murray Press, acquired world all-language rights to I Seek a Kind Person from James Pullen at Wylie. The book is scheduled for publication in January 2024. 

Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, has written I Seek a Kind Person as “a part memoir, part detective story” to uncover what happened to his father and seven other Jewish Viennese children who were saved from the Holocaust by classified ads in the Manchester Guardian, before an organised rescue mission was set in motion.

The blurb reads: “The book begins with the suicide of Julian Borger’s father, Robert Borger, when Julian was 22 years old. When Julian calls Robert’s adopted mother to tell her of the news, she says, Robert was the ‘Nazis’ last victim’. Eighty-three years later, identifying his father as the ‘11-year-old boy’ in a 1938 advertisement, Julian begins his investigation: starting with nothing but a page of newspaper adverts, he traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families, all thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war." 

John Murray said: “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, I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping family memoir. It spans multiple generations, to show, ultimately, how we live under the burden of history and the power simple acts of kindness can have in transforming our world.”

Hewson said: “In 2021 I was completely stopped in my tracks by a Guardian article Julian wrote about his father and the other Jewish children who were saved from the Nazis by newspaper adverts. We feel very privileged to be publishing his incredibly powerful, moving and ever-more-relevant book telling the fuller story.”

Borger said: "This book began with a chance discovery, a 1938 advert – in the newspaper for which I have worked for 30 years – that helped my father escape Nazi-ruled Vienna. I set out to find out more and to discover what happened to the other children, whose parents resorted to the adverts in a desperate bid to save them.”

He added: “The stories I found took me by surprise, from a world-beating Jewish football team to the Shanghai ghetto, a hunt through Germany’s woods for the last of the SS and a narrow escape from Auschwitz. Along the way, I uncovered things about my own family that astonished me. And I came across secrets that threw light on my father’s death, 45 years after the war."