Introducing Family Treasures Lost and Found
the documentary
five-part series of shorts
and my forthcoming memoir
I recently finished a documentary, Family Treasures Lost and Found, and a memoir which will be published by Post Hill Press in early 2025. Both are about my six-year quest to tell the story of my parents' flights from fascism during World War II. For the film, I collaborated with Emmy-winning director Marcia Rock, Director of News and Documentary at NYU's Journalism Institute. Here's the website for our film, which premiered at the Miami Jewish Film Festival in January 2024.
Our film and my book chronicle how far my father, a newly-minted Jewish doctor, and mother, a beautiful young Jewish woman enslaved in Germany––went physically, emotionally, and morally to save themselves. Their stories or survival are intertwined with how I used my investigative skills as a reporter and genealogical techniques to fill gaps in what my parents told my sisters and me. My father never discussed his past so we knew only the barest outline. My mother, in contrast, did speak to us about her survival, but only in snippets. In 1987, she contrbuted her story to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In the process, I honored my parents, sole surviving grandfather, and those lost during the war.
Besides scouring the Internet and probing online archives, I delved into domestic, European, and Israeli archives, had family documents translated and traveled to Vienna, Kraków, Tarnów, and Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). Other places I researched include Southern Germany's Bavaria, as well as to Havana, Veracruz, Mexico City, Palestine, and New York. Because of the language barrier in Lviv, where my father was born, I hired a genealogist and guide to find family birth and marriage entries in the State Archives of the Ukraine. I also hired a researcher to retrieve documents from the Warsaw AGAD Archive pertaining to my mother's family, which was from Kraków.
On our Treasures Website you can see our two-minute trailer and read more about the documentary and five-part series, which Marcia and I have edited for teachers to use in their classrooms.
Here's a review of the film in The Jewish Press.
Click here for an interview with us presented by the Miami Jewish Film Festival.
And here is an in-depth interview of me published by my alma mater, Hampshire College.
If you wish to donate to the film, please do so through our Women Make Movies Webpage.
Family Treasures Lost and Found, the documentary, is a Women Make Movies Production Assistance Program Project. Established in 1972, Women Make Movies is a 501(c)3 nonprofit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State. As the fiscal sponsor, WMM accepts donations or grants on behalf of the filmmaker and the takes the responsibility of administering the funds received in support of the development and completion of the film.