Author(s): Sara Rena Vidal

Biography

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.

This is true and set in history. These people were real. Their loss has coloured mylife as has the example of the Righteous who saved my parents.
—Sara Rena Vidal (author)