Oma und Bella (2012)

Regina Karolinski and Bella Katz have lived together since 2007 in a cozy apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The kitchen serves as their main gathering place, where they prepare various dishes together and carry on the customs of their childhood. Here, they talk especially about culinary memories of their childhoods in Katowice and Vilnius. Bella Katz and Regina Karolinski’s stories are always accompanied by humor and wit. They often underscore their stories with songs, while explaining the Yiddish expressions and Jewish traditions they mention. In interview scenes, both women talk about their life stories, shaped by surviving the Holocaust. Bella Katz managed to escape from the ghetto in Vilnius and joined Jewish partisans. In 1942, Regina Karolinski was interned in a labor camp in the Sudetenland. After being liberated by the Red Army, both had originally planned to emigrate to the United States. In 1945, they arrived at a DP camp in Berlin. In Berlin, they found partners, settled down, and remained in West Berlin. Other scenes show Bella Katz and Regina Karolinski going about their everyday tasks. They also take outings together and go for walks in Berlin. These scenes bring out their ideas about how to shape life together in old age, their awareness of their own physical frailty, and their constant determination to enjoy life as much as possible at every stage—above all, through the pleasure of food.