This memoir, Bella and Chaim, is a flowing collage which embraces and mingles memory, historical record, fragments of the 1950s, real-time journal entries and musings on the light, dark, and potential, of being alive. The whole is a testament to the human spirit.
For eighteen months from late 1943, Vidal’s parents lay in a small hole in the ground under a wood cutting machine in the backyard workshop of a retired Polish policeman in a suburb of occupied Warsaw. In claustrophobic dark, they waited while outside a world war raged. Their story is inspirational; it begins with life in Warsaw in loving families, transcends the catastrophic circumstances in which they meet, fall in love, are witness to the destruction of a way of life and the murder of their entire families, endure entombment, and concludes with liberation, and immigration to make a new life.
