"Oma and Bella" Explores Food as a Touchstone PARIS - Oma and Bella, Jewish grandmothers and Holocaust survivors, have lived together in Berlin since 2006, when Oma had a hip operation and Bella moved in to help take care of her. They play cards, read, take walks, watch television, entertain friends, tell stories, sing, go shopping. But mostly, they cook. Bella is Bella Katz, 88, who fled the Vilnius ghetto during the war, became a resistance fighter and eventually landed in a displaced persons' camp in Berlin as the pogroms started in the East. Oma is Regina Karolinski, 85, who grew up in Poland, survived in a labor camp in the Czech Republic and later ended up at the same displaced persons' camp as Bella. They lost their families in the Holocaust and met in the small, Jewish community recreated in Berlin after the war. The story of the life they have constructed together is told in "Oma & Bella," a documentary by Alexa Karolinski, a 28-year-old German-Canadian filmmaker who was born and raised in Berlin. Oma, which is also a pet word in German for grandmother, is her grandmother (and in the spirit of full disclosure, Ms. Karolinski's husband, Basil Katz, worked for me in The New York Times's Paris bureau some years ago). Oma and Bella celebrate life through their culinary creations, which are simple products of trial and error. They try to hold on to their childhoods before the war through the language and memory of food. They believe there is no sickness that cannot be healed through eating, and they don't believe in using measuring cups; they just feel what is right. Thirty-eight of their recipes have been collected and illustrated in "Oma & Bella: The Cookbook," a primer of central and eastern European Jewish cooking. It is a relic, a way of cooking and eating as activities that must be shared and that are untouched by either modern refinement or globalization. The dishes may never have existed exactly in this form; rather, they represent the women's continuing effort to recreate them as a tribute to their friendship and the memories of their families. The cornerstone of their cooking is slowly roasted onions, which simmer on the top of the stove for at least 40 minutes. A cupboard staple is their "spice mix": salt, cayenne pepper, fennel seeds, onion powder, garlic powder, nutmeg and celery salt, ground with a mortar and stored in an airtight container. All the best of Jewish comfort food is here: gefilte fish, chopped eggs, chopped liver, pickled herring, challah, chicken soup, matzah balls, barley soup, stuffed cabbage and cheese blintzes. "I only eat Jewish food," Oma says with defiance early in the film. Everyone has become modern. They eat everything. Not me.