Okay, I am at my wit's end here
I tried doing that as you said (using Calibre on a Mac) and I got the apostrophes and quote marks back but each one had an A with an umlaut before it. So then I got a tip from someone to use Book Designer which I do not have since I am a Mac user. I did see an option under LRF conversion to say pre-process the file as if it was from Book Designer, so I chose that. Did a convert to epub, then a convert to LRF, previewed in Calibre and everything looked perfect. But when I transferred the files to my reader, they were again missing all the punctuation.