How do hierarchical databases records link together?
My experience was with IBM IMS. The root held file offset pointers to locate its children, which in turn held pointers to their children, and so forth. The nearest equivalent in the relational world is Row Identifiers (RIDs) which are sometimes used to link the leaves of BTree indexes to the table row.

The analogy with Windows file system is not a bad one, in terms of the nesting and how access to lower items is through higher ones. The idea of a table doesn't really work, however. It may be better to think of it like a JSON document in a NoSQL store that has been shreaded by the DBMS and then internally linked through file pointers.