Karen A. Frenkel is the author of the new memoir Family Treasures Lost & Found. She is also a technology and science journalist, and is the producer of the companion documentary film Family Treasures Lost & Found.
Q: What inspired you to write Family Treasures Lost & Found, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: My parents inspired me. They and my sole surviving grandfather resisted fascism, and I realized that so did my lost grandparents, my uncle, his bride, and many other relatives, even though they were murdered.
My enigmatic father, a refugee who fled Europe just before the war, disclosed nothing about his childhood, family, medical education, how and when he got here, and his service in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
My sisters and I understood that we were not to ask him about his past. My mother told us the barest outline of his experience. He died when I was 15, so I never had a chance to speak to him adult-to-adult.
My mother, in contrast, spoke to us about her pre-WWII upbringing and how she survived the Nazi onslaught, but we sensed that she was selective about what she imparted.
She recorded her oral history with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Afterward she gave me an assignment, saying: “Maybe someday you'll do something with it.”
I knew I had a very unusual story to tell. Most WWII refugees like my father remained silent about their escapes from Europe. And unlike most Holocaust survivors, my mother was not imprisoned in a concentration camp; she survived by posing as a Polish Catholic and volunteered to work as a slave laborer in Germany.
I needed to investigate my father’s past to understand him better. I wanted to fill gaps in my parents’ stories, honor them for their extraordinary courage, resilience, and the thoughtful way they raised my sisters and me.
As Dr. Eva Fogelman, an early reviewer of my memoir, said, their stories shift the paradigm that assumed Holocaust survivors continued to be victims after the war.
I came up with the title after my sister, Ivy, likened my quest to a “treasure hunt” because of jewels our paternal grandfather had buried in his house in Lwów, now Lviv, Ukraine.
When I went there in 2016, I had low expectations about getting inside the house and finding the stash. I returned with precious scraps of information and new knowledge.
The elusive material treasure was supplanted by an emotional one. I added “lost and found” with its double entendre; many cherished, missing items remain unclaimed. I could not solve every mystery. Moreover, when memories are not shared, they, too, are forever lost.
Q: What do you see as the relationship between the memoir and your documentary film?
A: My memoir chronicles my childhood and teens. I describe the discovery in 1968 of my family’s huge collection of portraits, photos, and documents. These artifacts belonged to my maternal great-grandparents, who escaped Berlin for New York in 1940 and packed their most prized belongings in three steamer trunks. One was lost, two arrived.
I then detail all my discoveries, large and small, made during my quest, and describe the triumphs and fates of my relatives.
There are two versions of the documentary directed by Marcia Rock and produced by me: A 75-minute film, and a five-part series of shorts edited for classrooms.
Both my memoir and the documentary excerpt my mother’s Fortunoff testimony. The film includes interviews of me disclosing what I already knew from my mother and showing how I used my skills as a journalist to scour the world’s online and real archives.
My mother’s testimony and my narrative are interwoven, making the storytelling a dynamic mother and daughter duet.
The film shows major discoveries that could be visualized with images from my family collection, archival stills and footage, home movies my father shot, and footage I shot when I visited the relevant cities. So the discoveries depicted in the documentary are a subset of what I found.
The film offers viewers an immersive experience by showcasing my family’s portraits and hundreds of photographs as only film can. Viewers get a sense of the urban, assimilated Jewish cultures of prewar Kraków, Lwów, and Berlin that the Nazis destroyed.
And archival footage, stills, and animated maps contextualize the twists and turns of my parents’ and grandfather’s perilous paths to freedom.
It’s been thrilling to experience the different ways my family’s tale unfolds in both media. I hope all these modes of storytelling captivate readers and audiences alike, despite the difficult subject.
Q: The scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said of the book, “This beautifully written book, really two stories in one, is not only about what the author found. It is also a journey of discovery.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s a sensitive and apt comment that acknowledges the results and the process. The process was extremely difficult at first, especially because I felt that to delve into my father’s past, I had to defy my father and probe matters he deliberately kept secret. I believe he wished to protect my sisters and me.
We think that had he lived longer, he would have talked about his loss and his tour of duty when he returned to the Continent.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: We were devastated by my father’s unexpected death. Each decade of my adult life, I tried to delve into his past, but it was too painful.
In my late 50s, however, I felt I was running out of time, and realized that I had to shatter my father’s silence and face the impact of the Holocaust on my family and myself. Findings yielded an unexpected feeling of connection to the lost that made the arduous process worthwhile.
I hope my nieces and nephew, great-nieces and great-nephews, and their descendants will appreciate our legacy. More broadly, I want the world to understand what happened to our family.
It’s been a tough task because Family Treasures Lost and Found shows the consequences of genocidal antisemitism and the long reach of the tentacles of persecution, war, trauma, and loss.
Recognizing that we humans are not well equipped to fathom large numbers of victims, my approach has been to help readers and audiences relate to individuals’ predicaments.
I hope that experiencing the details of one family’s plight in the face of the Nazi onslaught will make the catastrophe more relatable and engender audiences’ empathy. That, in turn, may help prevent trauma and loss from happening to others.
I would like them to look upon today’s 121 million displaced with compassion. Despite today’s rise of authoritarianism, I hope this might translate into more tolerance and less international conflict.
I would also like Family Treasures to inspire viewers and readers to research their family histories while also learning about the Holocaust. Probing the past may yield unexpected feelings, like a greater sense of connection and solace, as it did for me. This emotional journey and fully venerating my relatives are, to me, the real treasures.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m focusing on marketing and seeking distribution for the documentary and five-part series because now, more than ever, it’s important to respond to the global rise of antisemitism. We need to educate the large numbers of people who do not recognize the historical consequences of antisemitism and don’t know about the Holocaust.
I have always felt, especially after finding a 1939 newspaper feature covering my father’s arrival in Havana and how an antisemitic emigration officer turned him away, that it could be the opening vignette for a narrative series chronicling my parents’ survival. I would like to collaborate with a producer or director on a screenplay for a feature film or a narrative series.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I would especially like young readers and audiences of all backgrounds to read my book and see the film. Even if they have never experienced anything like the exterminationist persecution my family faced, everyone has family secrets and loss.
They can put themselves in my relatives’ shoes and ask themselves what they would do in such circumstances. With that comes empathy and the desire to make our planet safer.
Tikkun Olam. May today’s youth heal the world and flourish.
Here are the websites for my memoir and the film:
https://www.familytreasuresmemoir.com
https://familytreasuresfilm.com
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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