BOOK REVIEW: A Personal Ad Saved His Father From The Nazis. That Was Just The Start.
At age 11, the author’s father fled Austria and, thanks to an ad in The Manchester Guardian, found a foster home in Wales.Credit...via Julian Borger BY SYLVIA BROWNRIGG In October 1938, soon after Robert Borger arrived at the Welsh home of his new foster parents, a teacher friend of theirs offered to take the 11-year-old refugee for a walk. “He went along, pale and trembling,” his son Julian Borger writes, reconstructing his father’s early days in Britain after a fraught exit from Austria. Robert Borger admitted later that he had been sure the man intended to kill him. His foster parents, the Bingleys, removed their teakettle’s whistle, as the sound reminded Bobby of the violent mobs of SA Brownshirts and Hitler Youth who had recently chased him through Vienna’s streets. Borger’s riveting book is filled with such vivid details, as he recounts seven Jewish children’s escapes from Austria after the Anschluss, “the original catastrophe” in their lives, when Hitler’s troops marched into th...
