Wartime Vignettes

This is the story of a young boy and of his parents caught up in World War II and in the Holocaust. It describes the events that impressed themselves upon the boy’s memory, as remembered by him as much as 75 years later. It recounts stories of life in the Polish ghettos, and of hiding from the Nazis and their collaborators. It describes the horrors he has witnessed, the narrow escapes he has had trying to save himself from being sent to the extermination gas chambers, and his life on the run. Finally, the book describes the return of the boy’s life to normalcy after the end of World War II.

Wartime Vignettes: A Boyhood Memoir of World War II and of Its Aftermath at first glance seems a story, like so many others, of a young boy and his family caught up in the Holocaust during World War II.

75 years later, T.A. Dolotta embarks on a trip down memory lane as he recalls those years of hiding in the Polish ghettos, narrow escapes from concentration camp death, and how the family made it to the end of the war and picked up the pieces of their world.

Unlike many similar accounts, this did not involve a flight to America during the war; but a process of survival in Europe to the war’s end and beyond. The family wound up in France, where Ted resumed his studies, and they lived there for years before they came to the U.S. to built new lives for themselves in America.

Unlike others which focus on escape to freedom, this memoir’s survey of determinations to survive reveals logic in the actions and processes of living in Poland during the war and offers insights too rarely touched upon elsewhere: “After a year or so, history repeated itself: more sweeps in the ghetto, more railroad coal gondolas with their soon-to-be-gassed human cargo, and my father still believing that safety lay in numbers. This time, we decided to go for broke: back to Warsaw and its ghetto.”

Even when Warsaw is almost completely destroyed by the war, his parents want to return and resume their lives – and this, too, represents a departure from most Holocaust memoirs, adding an extra dimension of insight to the portrait of lives transformed by war’s impact.

The result is a powerful survey that moves beyond personal family choices to consider how many survivors forged new lives for themselves during and after World War II, remaining in Europe.

No military or Holocaust collection should be without Wartime Vignettes.

 Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Ted Dolotta was born in 1934 in Warsaw, Poland. His father was a lawyer, a solo practitioner, and his mother had her own business, providing typing, printing, and duplication services, as well as translation services.

The family stayed in France for five years, where Ted went to highschool, and they eventually came to the United States in 1951. Ted went to college at Lehigh University and to graduate school at Princeton University. While there, he met and married his wife, Barbara. Ted was awarded a one-year NATO postdoctoral fellowship, which he spent at the Institute for Applied Mathematics of Grenoble, France (IMAG). Upon his return to the United States in 1962, he was a member of the faculty and of the senior staff at Princeton University for seven years.

He then worked for a small company he started called Princeton Time Sharing Services for five years, Bell Telephone Laboratories for eleven years, and a Japanese company called SoftBank for eighteen years. He retired in 2002. He has three sons and five grandchildren. Before his wife died in 2014, he promised her he would write and publish Wartime Vignettes.