Table of contents:
- How Jews Desperately Wanted to Save Their Children
- Responses to children's "ads"
- 200 years is a great time
- How it all started
- Saving advertising
Video: How Jewish parents used Guardian ads to save their children's lives during the Holocaust
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
This month marks 200 years since the founding of the Guardian print publication in Manchester. For the Guardian's international editor, Julian Borger, part of the magazine's history is deeply personal. In 1938, a wave of classified ads erupted there as parents, including his grandparents, tried to get their children out of Nazi Germany. What came of this and what happened to these families later?
How Jews Desperately Wanted to Save Their Children
An ingenious idea came to mind of Julian's grandfather, Leo Borger. He came up with an ad in the newspaper. Its text read: “I am looking for a kind person who will educate my boy. He is very smart, from a good family, he is 11 years old. It was a small advertising message that only cost a shilling a line. Beneath it was the name of the Borgers, with the address of their family apartment on the Hintzerstrasse in Vienna's third district.
Then many Jewish families took advantage of this practice. They ordered advertisements on the pages of the Manchester Guardian, where they painted all kinds of virtues of their children.
Responses to children's "ads"
Two Welsh schoolteachers, Nancy and Reg Bingley, responded to Leo Borger's ad. They took Robert and raised him to his teens. Thanks to the resourcefulness of his father and the kindness of the Bingleys, a miracle happened. A true miracle of survival, and almost 83 years later, Julian works for the publication that helped save his father's life. Thanks to which he himself was able to come into this world.
Of course, there were many similar messages. There were lucky ones who managed to escape in this way, and there were those who were unlucky. Robert's parents also managed to leave. They received a visa and also came to the UK. There they found work and settled.
200 years is a great time
To mark the 200th anniversary of the Manchester Guardian this month, Julian decided to conduct his own investigation. He wanted to know what happened to the children whose parents used advertisements in this magazine to try to help them escape.
These lines, full of despair, read like a cry of persistent, competing voices, they all beg: "Take my child!" And people took it. Simple advertisements, very detailed, often trite, which then filled the front pages of the Guardian, helped save lives.
The ads show all the pain of parents who are sometimes ready to abandon their only child, if only he had a chance to live.
How it all started
The annexation of Austria by the Nazis took place five months before Borger's announcement was posted. At the same time, laws were introduced that deprived Jews of basic rights. Groups of Nazis, the so-called brown shirts, had complete freedom of action in Vienna. They beat and humiliated Jews in every possible way.
“My grandfather Leo, who owned a shop for radios and musical instruments, was called to the Gestapo headquarters for registration. He was ordered, like other Viennese Jews, to get on all fours and wash the sidewalk in front of the mocking crowd,”says Julian. “The next time he was summoned, he was detained for the whole night. Then he was held in custody for a longer time after Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. Then all Jewish businesses were plundered and most of the synagogues in Vienna were destroyed. Many, perhaps most, Viennese Jews were taken to Dachau, a camp in Bavaria.
Saving advertising
By the late summer of 1938, many Viennese Jews were advertising themselves in the Manchester Guardian column as butlers, chauffeurs, and maids. At the time, the UK was short of domestic workers, as the expansion of prosperous suburbs opened up many other opportunities for the British and created jobs for outsiders.
Meanwhile, panic was gaining momentum. Jewish families were desperate to escape. Not all were in time. The Guardian helped as much as they could. They not only published all these announcements, they supported the refugees both informationally and financially.
“Of course, the way the Manchester Guardian reported Nazi anti-Semitism and supported the entry of refugees and then their protection in Britain during the Nazi era can be seen as one of the things the newspaper is proud of,” says the current editor-in-chief.
If you are interested in this topic, read our article on how what the aristocrat Audrey Hepburn did during the Second World War: the secret life of a Hollywood star.
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