Lost and Found: A Family Memoir
SynopsisPlot
Sara Borczuk Applebaum, born in Kyrgyzstan in 1942 is a survivor of the Holocaust dedicated to recovering her family's stories and findinganswers to lingering questions of what happened. After a long career in education and retiring from her position as a school principal, she became intensely involved in genealogical research. That was part of the answer to finding some of the "LOST". Recovering her family's stories was the "FOUND" part. She sought to understand the remarkable people that were her parents and how theysurvived. They overcame deportation to Siberia and then Kyrgyzstan, andharrowing times there. Her father overcame being wounded and survived his time in a Polish unit of the Russian Army. They managed toget back to and then out of a newly Communist Poland to find her sister in Belgium. Eventually they made it to America ... stateless refugees to a new homeland. Our family stories and our own personal stories, make us who we are. It is to the memories of the "Lost and Found" and to the manypeople...both individuals and organizations, that help recover and preserve the stories...that this book is dedicated.
Story
About this book
Sara Borczuk Applebaum was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1942, during one of the most turbulent periods of the twentieth century. Her parents had been deported first to Siberia and then to Kyrgyzstan, where the family endured severe hardship. Her father was wounded while serving in a Polish unit of the Russian Army. After the war, the family managed to return to Poland, now under Communist rule, and eventually left the country to reunite with a relative in Belgium before making their way to the United States as stateless refugees.
Lost and Found traces Applebaum's effort to reconstruct this family history. After a long career in education, including work as a school principal, she turned to genealogical research as a way to recover names, places, and connections that displacement had scattered. The title reflects two sides of that project: the people and records that were lost, and the stories she was able to piece together through research and memory.
The memoir focuses on who her parents were and how they navigated deportation, war, and repeated uprooting across multiple countries. It follows a path from Central Asia through Eastern Europe to Western Europe and finally North America, mapping the physical and administrative obstacles facing refugees with no state to claim them.
