Film Screening: Family Treasures Lost and Found

Family Treasures was directed by Marcia Rock and produced by Karen A. Frenkel, a journalist and child of Holocaust survivors. It is unusual in that viewers learn about the Holocaust through Karen’s investigation of her family’s past and many discoveries, and because her parents were not in concentration camps; Dr. David A. Frenkel was a refugee who escaped Poland in early 1939.

Karen’s mother, Irena Goldberger Frenkel, survived posing as a Catholic Pole. The film is visually stunning because Karen inherited a huge family archive of art and photos from her mother’s grandparents, who fled Berlin in 1940. Audiences see vestiges of Polish Jewish urban upper-middle class culture that the Nazis obliterated. Audiences also appreciate the warning signs of fascist anti-Semitism and see how the Nazi onslaught obliterated Jews who would not or could not leave.

Karen’s father never discussed his pre-war life, including his medical school years in Vienna, but Karen learns that in the mid-1930s Austro-fascist students beat and tortured him and his classmates. After getting his degree just after the Anschluss, he returned home to Lwów, now November 2024

Lviv, Ukraine. There he married an American tourist who returned alone to the U.S. He sailed to Havana on a French ship while the St. Louis was at anchor. Karen found a newspaper article describing his first wife on the dock entreating an anti-Semitic immigration officer to let Dr. Frenkel disembark. No Jews were allowed to come ashore.

Karen’s mother, Irena Goldberger recorded an oral history for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In a storytelling duet, mother and daughter recount how Irena survived. At age 17 her parents forced her to leave them for Tarnów to live with an aunt. Audiences join Karen as she enters her great-aunt’s former apartment and gets into the former Gestapo Headquarters, now an apartment building, where her mother obtained a special work card stamp that saved her life. Irena and her aunt were forced into the ghetto, but Irena’s parents sent false papers enabling her to impersonate a Catholic. She escaped and volunteered to work as a slave laborer in Germany, a daring and counter-intuitive tactic.

Karen also traced her sole-surviving grandfather’s arduous escape across mountains and the sea to Palestine, forever leaving his home in Lwów.

Through documenting their histories, these relatives cease to be mere names. These riveting stories of survival, luck, and loss have the power to captivate viewers of all generations. Viewers of various backgrounds will understand on a very personal level the courage of those who survived and of those lost. These tales will inspire many to research their own family histories and perhaps as a result feel more connected to their relatives and where they came from.

In the end, Karen honors her surviving relatives, ensures that the lost are remembered and that memories of a destroyed culture will endure. She remarks, “I learned that it’s possible to love people you’ve never met.”

Family Treasures Lost and Found is timely because of the rise of anti-Semitism and authoritarian regimes worldwide. It encourages empathy for the persecuted of the past and today’s 121 million displaced.

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