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Family Treasures Lost & Found
In this captivating memoir, journalist Karen A. Frenkel unravels her parents’ and sole surviving grandparent’s secret, riveting stories of survival during World War II.
How do you shatter the silence that muffles family stories when those who knew what happened are gone?
In Family Treasures Lost and Found, journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Karen A. Frenkel, investigates her parents’ unspoken WWII stories. Readers accompany Frenkel on her quest and discovery of how her resourceful parents survived on the run from the Nazis. Her research leads to shocking revelations of one parent’s trans-Atlantic escape to Mexico and New York, and how the other eluded capture throughout Eastern and Central Europe with false papers. Having scoured online and real-world archives and visited the relevant cities, Frenkel honors her parents, her sole surviving grandparent, and her lost relatives, who cease to be mere names and who she came to respect and love. The tale Frenkel weaves is both personal and universal, as we begin to feel that her family could be ours.
Frenkel also shares her refugee great-grandparents’ rare and huge collection of stunning oil and pastel portraits, photos, and documents, which were discovered in 1968 in garbage bags. Most Holocaust families lost everything, but these cherished artifacts reveal the Jewish assimilated culture in Kraków and Berlin that the Nazis obliterated. Readers also join Frenkel on her visit to Vienna, Kraków, Tarnów, and Lviv, Ukraine, where the action took place.
Such astonishing tales of survival, resistance, luck, and loss have the power to captivate readers of all generations and backgrounds and inspire them to explore their own family histories.
How do you shatter the silence that muffles family stories when those who knew what happened are gone?
In Family Treasures Lost and Found, journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Karen A. Frenkel, investigates her parents’ unspoken WWII stories. Readers accompany Frenkel on her quest and discovery of how her resourceful parents survived on the run from the Nazis. Her research leads to shocking revelations of one parent’s trans-Atlantic escape to Mexico and New York, and how the other eluded capture throughout Eastern and Central Europe with false papers. Having scoured online and real-world archives and visited the relevant cities, Frenkel honors her parents, her sole surviving grandparent, and her lost relatives, who cease to be mere names and who she came to respect and love. The tale Frenkel weaves is both personal and universal, as we begin to feel that her family could be ours.
Frenkel also shares her refugee great-grandparents’ rare and huge collection of stunning oil and pastel portraits, photos, and documents, which were discovered in 1968 in garbage bags. Most Holocaust families lost everything, but these cherished artifacts reveal the Jewish assimilated culture in Kraków and Berlin that the Nazis obliterated. Readers also join Frenkel on her visit to Vienna, Kraków, Tarnów, and Lviv, Ukraine, where the action took place.
Such astonishing tales of survival, resistance, luck, and loss have the power to captivate readers of all generations and backgrounds and inspire them to explore their own family histories.
418 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 11, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 23, 2025
Family Teasures Lost & Found by Karen A. Frenkel is a memoir that follows Karen as she traces and investigates her family’s past during World War II. As the story opens, Karen adds her own personal memory, some historical trauma, and a bit of digital sleuthing, and it makes the beginning very powerful. She realizes, when looking back, that as a child, her father’s seasonal depression was due to his mother’s wartime suicide in Lviv, after the Gestapo deported her. This was one part of her father’s past that he was never able to speak of for many years, but Karen decided in 2014 to do her own probing and found his childhood home using Google Street View. This amber-fronted townhouse becomes the symbol of a family’s historical and literal “buried treasure” as Karen recalls her family mentioning that there were jewels hidden in the basement from the Nazis and Soviets. Karen resolves to recover the fragments of her family’s history and untold stories. Readers will be instantly pulled into this story, immersing themselves in history.
As Karen continues this lovely memoir, we shift into Karen’s father’s years at the University of Vienna. Austro-fascist students and Nazi Brown Shirts storm into the anatomy lecture hall of Professor Julius Tandler. They brutally attack Jewish and Socialist students and chant Nazi anthems. This chapter highlights how science, politics, and antisemitism overlap long before the Anschluss. She discovers so much about her dad and his socialist leanings, along with his admiration for Professor Tandler’s Viennese visions of medicine. She realizes everything that shaped her father early on, from Jewish and Socialist persecutions to idealism, and even the unspoken pain. It was touching how she laid out this entire chapter in her father’s life. It will resonate not just with Jewish people of today, but with other groups who have gone through similar persecutions and injustices.
As if the opening chapter hadn’t already pulled me in, I was really at attention when Karen’s investigative lens unearths a startling revelation about her father: he was previously married to a woman named Rose Frenkel. This was just a casual discovery of an Army ID card, and after some digging and piecing together ship manifests, newly discovered relatives, Frankel was able to find out that this arrangement was less romantic and more strategic. The more she dug, the more she found that led to an entanglement with the Jewish mafia, the “Kosher Nostra.” Then the story moves on to her parents’ life post-war in New York. The tone is softer in this part of the story, but the trauma is still present. This chapter would be the prime example of how immigrant families learn to negotiate losses, displacement, and cultural identity, teaching their children to strive for excellence, all the while quietly carrying the weight left by genocide. Frenkel did a wonderful job showing how history shapes personality.
One of my favorite chapters is when Frenkel’s mom discovered the large family portraits and oil paintings from 1912 after her aunt Lucia passed away from a brain tumor. I am beginning to realize that the family treasures are about more than just the jewels that were rumored to be hidden in Frenkel’s father’s old family home. Treasures also come in the form of portraits and paintings, even on her mother’s side of the family. They discover four forgotten portraits that are not merely objects; they are narrative witnesses. Frenkel was able to piece together a world prior to the war, a world of Jewish refinement, privilege, and cultural assimilation. Yet, this world is eventually obliterated through genocide, but preserved only in paintings. It’s sad, touching, and beautiful all at the same time.
Frenkel does a wonderful job shifting back and forth through different time periods that piece together family revelations and history. By chapters sixteen through nineteen, we are back in 1941 when the Germans invade Poland, which was occupied by the soviets at the time. Putting together survivor’s testimony, archived records, and her own research, it’s a sad truth that unfolds, especially as Frenkel learns that her grandfather, Izydor, narrowly escaped by running in a zig-zag, something he’d learned from World War I. Then she draws on psychological experiences when her mom is arguing with Izydor about getting false documents. It shows how her grandfather’s ethics and pride became a bit misplaced during a time he was forced into survival mode. Where her mother’s insistence that they would never survive as Jews marks her as the family member to look at the reality they were facing. I found it intriguing how Frenkel was able to combine historical radio broadcasts, casualty reports, and the declaration of war by the United States based on her own father’s perspective. It really brings out her father’s desire to fulfill duty; he wanted to enlist, while also being advised to finish his medical residency. The chapter is so profound; while Frenkel’s father realizes his family is facing annihilation, he’s also preparing to rebuild his life in America through medicine. I could imagine the dilemma and feel what he was feeling on these pages.
The pacing is slow but intense. Frenkel does not rush through the history, but she puts together a well-structured documentary with a bit of sleuthing. I love how she was able to reconstruct so much history to tell what was missing from her family’s story. There’s a natural rhythm that is created between the digging and the present. She takes extra care to incorporate the intimacy of daily life, from her mom’s strict parenting to childhood dyslexia, teen rebellion, and all the sensory details like the subway commutes and the cherry trees. The style is very appealing, blending biography with history and introspective parts. Family Treasures Lost & Found has a distinctively interrogative voice, with Karen Frenkel’s “what really happened?” curiosity leading to untold truths. Readers who enjoyed The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn will find Frenkel’s story right at home.
As Karen continues this lovely memoir, we shift into Karen’s father’s years at the University of Vienna. Austro-fascist students and Nazi Brown Shirts storm into the anatomy lecture hall of Professor Julius Tandler. They brutally attack Jewish and Socialist students and chant Nazi anthems. This chapter highlights how science, politics, and antisemitism overlap long before the Anschluss. She discovers so much about her dad and his socialist leanings, along with his admiration for Professor Tandler’s Viennese visions of medicine. She realizes everything that shaped her father early on, from Jewish and Socialist persecutions to idealism, and even the unspoken pain. It was touching how she laid out this entire chapter in her father’s life. It will resonate not just with Jewish people of today, but with other groups who have gone through similar persecutions and injustices.
As if the opening chapter hadn’t already pulled me in, I was really at attention when Karen’s investigative lens unearths a startling revelation about her father: he was previously married to a woman named Rose Frenkel. This was just a casual discovery of an Army ID card, and after some digging and piecing together ship manifests, newly discovered relatives, Frankel was able to find out that this arrangement was less romantic and more strategic. The more she dug, the more she found that led to an entanglement with the Jewish mafia, the “Kosher Nostra.” Then the story moves on to her parents’ life post-war in New York. The tone is softer in this part of the story, but the trauma is still present. This chapter would be the prime example of how immigrant families learn to negotiate losses, displacement, and cultural identity, teaching their children to strive for excellence, all the while quietly carrying the weight left by genocide. Frenkel did a wonderful job showing how history shapes personality.
One of my favorite chapters is when Frenkel’s mom discovered the large family portraits and oil paintings from 1912 after her aunt Lucia passed away from a brain tumor. I am beginning to realize that the family treasures are about more than just the jewels that were rumored to be hidden in Frenkel’s father’s old family home. Treasures also come in the form of portraits and paintings, even on her mother’s side of the family. They discover four forgotten portraits that are not merely objects; they are narrative witnesses. Frenkel was able to piece together a world prior to the war, a world of Jewish refinement, privilege, and cultural assimilation. Yet, this world is eventually obliterated through genocide, but preserved only in paintings. It’s sad, touching, and beautiful all at the same time.
Frenkel does a wonderful job shifting back and forth through different time periods that piece together family revelations and history. By chapters sixteen through nineteen, we are back in 1941 when the Germans invade Poland, which was occupied by the soviets at the time. Putting together survivor’s testimony, archived records, and her own research, it’s a sad truth that unfolds, especially as Frenkel learns that her grandfather, Izydor, narrowly escaped by running in a zig-zag, something he’d learned from World War I. Then she draws on psychological experiences when her mom is arguing with Izydor about getting false documents. It shows how her grandfather’s ethics and pride became a bit misplaced during a time he was forced into survival mode. Where her mother’s insistence that they would never survive as Jews marks her as the family member to look at the reality they were facing. I found it intriguing how Frenkel was able to combine historical radio broadcasts, casualty reports, and the declaration of war by the United States based on her own father’s perspective. It really brings out her father’s desire to fulfill duty; he wanted to enlist, while also being advised to finish his medical residency. The chapter is so profound; while Frenkel’s father realizes his family is facing annihilation, he’s also preparing to rebuild his life in America through medicine. I could imagine the dilemma and feel what he was feeling on these pages.
The pacing is slow but intense. Frenkel does not rush through the history, but she puts together a well-structured documentary with a bit of sleuthing. I love how she was able to reconstruct so much history to tell what was missing from her family’s story. There’s a natural rhythm that is created between the digging and the present. She takes extra care to incorporate the intimacy of daily life, from her mom’s strict parenting to childhood dyslexia, teen rebellion, and all the sensory details like the subway commutes and the cherry trees. The style is very appealing, blending biography with history and introspective parts. Family Treasures Lost & Found has a distinctively interrogative voice, with Karen Frenkel’s “what really happened?” curiosity leading to untold truths. Readers who enjoyed The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn will find Frenkel’s story right at home.
March 26, 2025
NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOLOCAUST MEMOIR
An extraordinary story, beautifully rendered, about the horror of war, hatred and displacement, and a meticulous reconstruction of one family’s journey through the darkest years of history.
An extraordinary story, beautifully rendered, about the horror of war, hatred and displacement, and a meticulous reconstruction of one family’s journey through the darkest years of history.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews