‘I Seek a Kind Person' Review: A Lifeline in the Classified Section

Wall Street Journal

4 days ago

'Nobody wanted us. . . . Nobody opened their doors to us.' Lisbeth Weiss was only 11 when, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, uncontrolled outbreaks of antisemitic violence confirmed that she and her Viennese Jewish family were in danger. They were also trapped: Even as Hitler's anti-Jewish laws became increasingly vicious, strict regulations against receiving refugees in countries around the world cut off almost all possible exit routes.
In their desperation to save their only child, Lisbeth's parents tried a ploy so unusual it is almost absent from the literature of Holocaust history: They placed a classified ad in a Manchester, England, newspaper asking if a British family might step forward to care for a 'clever child worthy of support.'
Remarkably—one might almost say miraculously—a family in Oldham, near Manchester, said yes. In 'I Seek a Kind Person,' Julian Borger, an editor with the Guardian newspaper, tracks the histories of Lisbeth and nine other Austrian children who owe their survival to newspaper ads and the people whose answers allowed them to forge new lives in foreign countries.
Mr. Borger reveals that his own father, Robert, was one of those young refugees. The emotional costs, he tells us, were steep. Most of the children never saw their families again, often not learning, until decades later, when and where their relatives were murdered. Gertrude Batscha describes her years of uncertainty about her family's fate as a loneliness that 'got in your limbs.' Like several of the adolescent refugees, Gertrude was forced to perform domestic work for her foster family and provide child care for their biological children.