Son blown away by Manchester newspaper advert nearly 40 years after dad's death

Julian Borger remembers coming home from the dentist to find a young policeman standing by his mum at the kitchen table. "Not nearly old enough" to be the messenger of such devastating news, he was told his father's body had been discovered a week after he went missing.

Aged 23 at the time of his father Robert's death in 1983, Julian was tasked with delivering the news to other family members. Telephoning his father's foster mother, who they called Nans, he gave her the terrible news.

"On the other end of the line, there was an intake of breath, a pause and then Nans said firmly: 'Robert was the Nazis' last victim. They got to him in the end'," Julian, now the Guardian newspaper's foreign affairs editor, recalls in his new memoir - I Seek A Kind Person.

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"For the first few moments, the words buzzed in the plastic phone and I had nothing to say. She had delivered them with the resigned conviction of someone stating the obvious, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

"This was 1983 after all, forty-five years after my dad fled Vienna. We had all assumed he had been dragged down by more immediate concerns, a sense of turmoil, failure and disappointment in his personal life and career," he adds.

Nearly 40 years on, it's only been in the past few years that Julian has changed the way he thinks about his father's death, thanks to a chance discovery in a former Manchester newspaper. As a Jewish child, Robert escaped Vienna and found a new home in Britain when he was eleven years old, seven months after Hitler carried out his Anschluss (the annexation