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.
"This remarkable book in itself exemplifies the significance of facing up to and finding ways of living with an almost unbearable past." ―Financial Times
"The stories [Borger] has been able to salvage are remarkable threads connecting the present to a dark past, marked by the will to survive. Intriguing and humane, a worthwhile addition to Holocaust studies." --Kirkus Reviews
"Borger fills out the historical context with great clarity...These losses were 'unmentionable, ' a heavy burden growing heavier and darker the more it was ignored. At the same time, those who lived told tales shot through with the joy of survival, the wonder of escape and the lives it made possible." --Times Literary Supplement
"Part memoir, part detective story...profoundly affecting." --Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
"Tender, evocative, and deeply moving." --Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
"Powerful, eloquent...I loved it." --Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes