In August, 1938, a classified ad in The Manchester Guardian read: “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family.”
The ad — and others like it, which ran alongside the crossword puzzle, radio programming and competing pitches for stamps and musical instruments — was placed in the British newspaper by Leo Borger, a Viennese Jew. It was answered by Nan and Reginald Bingley, teachers in Caernarfon, Wales.Borger’s son, Robert (known as Bobby), was taken in by the Bingleys and lived with them throughout the war, thus escaping the fate of the tens of thousands of Austrian Jews who were sent to Nazi concentration camps. The family was “an open tap of kindness,” and supported Bobby until he reached adulthood.
The author of this book, Julian Borger, is Robert’s son. Coincidentally, he is now a prize-winning reporter for the same newspaper — now The Guardian—where his grandfather placed that fateful ad. When he discovered his father’s history, Borger was inspired to learn more about the unusual ad and others like it, which ran in the period between the Anschluss on March 12, 1938 and the Kindertransport, which began on December 10 of that year. “The ads were like telegrams from another age: urgent and compressed,” he writes.
After the Anschluss, a “coiled spring of hatred was unleashed on the city.” Adult Jews were forced to scrub pavements and walls with toothbrushes; children were expelled from schools and beaten by Brownshirts. Jewish families desperately sought a safe haven for their children.
Some of the children who found sponsors, including Bobby, left Austria accompanied by a parent. Other children’s experiences were not as happy as Bobby’s: they found sanctuary, but “sometimes a bitter one,” as they were lonely and isolated, and at times bore the brunt of antisemitism.
Intrigued by his father’s journey, Borgen set out to find other children (and their hosts and descendants) whose families had placed Guardian ads. His assiduous reporting took him around the world. Gertrude Langer, whose ad appeared on the same day as Bobby’s, was fourteen when she was sent to Maidenhead. By 1940, she was in Shanghai, through the good offices of Ho Feng-Shan, a Chinese consul general in Vienna, who defied the orders of his superior and issued 2,000 visas to Jews. Ho is honored at Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among Nations.” The father of Fred Schwartz never received a response to his ad, so Fred joined his older brother Frits in making a daring escape to Holland. When the Nazis invaded in May 1940, the brothers were sent to Westerbork and then to Birkenau — from where they escaped just as the Red Army was approaching. George Mandler, grew up near the Danube Canal mere kilometers away from Robert Borger. He ended up in New York and in May 1944 enlisted in the U.S. Army. Mandler became one of the Ritchie Boys, the German and Austrian refugees who used their language skills to gather valuable intelligence behind enemy lines.
Because Borger launched his investigation after his father’s death by suicide and decades after the war, he had to make gargantuan efforts to track down the survivors, sometimes with only the name of the family that placed an ad. His ability to piece together so many different stories is remarkable. Though the children’s lives did not intersect, the composition of the chapters often includes parts of several of their histories. It may take a second read to keep each story straight.
Borger shows great curiosity, tenacity and compassion as he interviews survivors and their descendants. They tell him they are hesitant to call themselves victims of the Holocaust because they didn’t suffer like the children who endured the ghettos or the camps. Yet when Bobby’s Welsh foster mother learned he had committed suicide, she told his son, “Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got to him in the end.”
Elaine Elinson is coauthor of the award-winning Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.
