On I Seek a Kind Person by Julian Borger
By Andrea Elise
This is Andrea Elise, coming to you from Amarillo, TX.
I’ve never liked jigsaw puzzles. The irregular curves and edges of each piece all look the same, and trying to discover which piece connects to another is a challenge I am not disciplined enough to do.
However, Julian Borger’s I Seek a Kind Person makes trying something intricate worthwhile. Julian takes on the interlocking and absorbing task of finding, not only his own relatives, but also seven others who – as children – were dispatched to families outside of Austria in 1938.
Ads or “adverts” in the Manchester Guardian materialized because desperate Jewish parents in Vienna tried to find homes in other countries for their children as the Anschluss became a death knell for Jews in Austria. Julian’s process to learn what happened became a serpentine jigsaw puzzle, born out of love, loss and determination.
The ads are excruciating. The first two I read immediately elicited tears:
“Fervent prayer in great distress – Who would give a home to a grammar school scholar aged 13; healthy, clever, very musical….Vienna 5”.
“I seek a good person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family. Borger…Vienna 3.”
What struck me instantly about the adverts was the sheer desperation of parents begging total strangers to take their children for a chance at life, something they themselves knew would probably never happen if they did not escape.
One of the many themes Julian explores in his memoir is epigenetics, “the route by which our environment and experience, particularly trauma, can make its way into our DNA, changing the way genes are expressed.”
Think about a child whisked away to another country to live with strangers, not understanding what or why it was happening. One of the first words that registers is “trauma.”
Among the various experiences the “adoptees” had in common was a fathomless sense of being lost and disoriented. One of the women who survived recalled the loss as “a slow orphanhood.”
Julian’s situation was most clearly defined by his father’s actions. Robert (or Bobby) Borger married and had four children. He received a degree and spent more than two decades lecturing about psychology.
On a September day in 1983, Julian stopped at his mother’s house and found her sitting at a table with an ashen look. Julian’s father had killed himself, using whisky and painkillers, the latter of which he stole from Julian’s grandmother.
Robert’s suicide note, neatly written, expressed that he could not see a tolerable way out of his circumstances and that he did not want his children to deal with a “lonely and depressed old man.”
When Julian reached out to tell the woman in Wales who had fostered Robert about his father’s death, Nans’ response was spirit shattering. She reportedly stated, “Robert was the Nazi’s last victim. They got to him in the end.”
Julian quotes a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun who says, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
We may want to let go of history, but that does not mean history is finished with us. Let that knowledge become a caution in the year to come.
This is Andrea Elise for the High Plains Radio Readers Book Club.
