Film Screening: Family Treasures Lost and Found

In Family Treasures Lost and Found, we follow Karen on her investigation as she uncovers story after incredible story. Her father never talked about attending medical school in Vienna, but Karen learns that Austro-fascists and Nazis they invited from Germany beat and tortured him and his fellow students. Dr. Frenkel also never described his escape from Europe in 1939 enabled by marrying an American tourist. We follow his circuitous journey through Europe, Cuba, Mexico, and arrival in New York, where he divorces his first wife, a gangster moll. Karen’s mother, Irena Goldberger, spoke selectively to her daughters about her horrors, and recorded an oral history for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Irena reveals in stark detail her horrendous ordeals: at age 16 she ventures out into the streets of Lwów, Poland, now Lviv, Ukraine, to find food for her family; it was too dangerous for her parents to leave the house. After separating from her parents on their insistence, she goes to Tarnów and gets a special stamp on her work card at Gestapo Headquarters. There she passes by vicious Commander Grunow, who randomly shoots Jews. Irena wants to kill him or die from Allied bombs, but instead escapes the Tarnów ghetto by hiding in a peasant’s hay wagon. With false papers enabling her to pose as a Catholic Pole, she goes to Germany to work as a slave laborer until Liberation. We also follow the escape from Lwów to Palestine of Karen’s sole surviving grandparent.

Far from dusty archival research, Family Treasures reveals the complexity and satisfaction of this investigative adventure. These riveting stories of survival, luck, and loss, will interest all generations and inspire many to delve into their own family history.

Karen A. Frenkel is a technology and science journalist, editor, author, and producer. Her two award-winning documentaries cover the impact of technology on society and appeared on public television. Minerva’s Machine: Women and Computing (1995) examines why there are so few women engineers and computer scientists. net.LEARNING (1998), a two-hour documentary, explores the trade-offs students and faculty are willing to make in online classrooms. While producing Family Treasures Lost and Found she has been writing a companion memoir about her quest.

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