How do you shat­ter the silence that muf­fles fam­i­ly sto­ries when the wit­ness­es are gone? In Fam­i­ly Trea­sures Lost and Found, jour­nal­ist and daugh­ter of Holo­caust sur­vivors, Karen A. Frenkel, inves­ti­gates her par­ents’ unspo­ken WWII sto­ries. Her quest yields shock­ing rev­e­la­tions of one parent’s trans-Atlantic escape to the Caribbean and Mex­i­co and how the oth­er elud­ed cap­ture in Europe with a feigned iden­ti­ty. Hav­ing scoured online and real-world archives and vis­it­ed the rel­e­vant cities — Vien­na, Kraków, Tarnów, and Lviv, Ukraine — Frenkel hon­ors her par­ents, sole sur­viv­ing grand­par­ent, and lost rel­a­tives, whom 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’ huge col­lec­tion of stun­ning oil and pas­tel por­traits, pho­tos, and doc­u­ments. Most Holo­caust fam­i­lies lost every­thing, but these trea­sured arti­facts reveal the Jew­ish assim­i­lat­ed cul­ture in Kraków and Berlin the Nazis oblit­er­at­ed. 

These aston­ish­ing tales of sur­vival, luck, loss, and resilience will cap­ti­vate and inspire read­ers to explore their own fam­i­ly histories.