Tag Archives: hunger

When pigs eat better than children

08 Wednesday May 2013

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Do hard times bring a people together?

They can. But in postwar Germany, in many instances, they didn’t. Especially in the hunger winter of 1946-47.

Hunger drove the people living in the ruined cities out into the countryside. They 414px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-S80285,_Bahnhof_Gorgast,_'Hamsterfahrt'traded anything they could spare for food. The “hamsters” from the industrial Ruhr area clogged trains heading north to the farms in Lower Saxony, or south to the Eifel region. In backpacks and suitcases, they carried their crystal and porcelain, their damask table cloths and silver mirrors.

When the hamsters arrived in the countryside, they went on a humiliating round of the farms – begging to trade. The problem: the farmers had everything already.

Back then, Thea Merkelbach was 8 years old. Her anecdote in the book Hungerwinter sticks in my mind as a sign of how cruel people can be to others – without realizing it.

Once my mother asked for a little milk from a farmer who had 10 cows. The farmer’s wife was baking. The cookies were too dark and hard to her, so she wanted to toss them to the pigs. My mother asked for a few: ‘Give me a few before the pigs get some!’ The farmer’s wife did. She wouldn’t have thought of it herself.

In another anecdote, a boy who was 11 years old at the time told how a farmer tossed potato peels onto a dung heap for the children to eat.

From the farmers’ perspective, the hamsters from the city were a plague. Wolfgang Herchner said in Hungerwinter:

The hamsters overran the land like locusts… They stole from the farmers, sometimes in a massive way! Some fields were half dug up because cabbage or carrots had been planted there.

Even farmers who sincerely wanted to help the hungry couldn’t give to even a fraction of the people flowing in from the cities. There simply wasn’t that much to go around.

And maybe after the Nazis trumpeted the Volksgemeinschaft (a unified community of the German people) for years, some people had enough of sacrificing for others. In postwar Germany, it was every man for himself.

*Photo:Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S80285 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Postwar children – a health report

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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On the playground  in my neighborhood of Essen, an old woman sat beside me on the bench while my daughters and her grandchild played in the sand. We struck up a conversation, and me being me, I asked her if she remembered much from the postwar years.

I remember being hungry. All the time. Once my mother sent me to a shop to get apples for my sister and me. Just two apples. I walked all the way home fighting the urge to eat them. I wanted to lie to my mother and tell her the shop ran out. I loved my sister but I was so hungry, I would’ve eaten her share  even though I knew she’d cry.

To many people, the only innocents in Germany after the war were the children. Still, they shared the catastrophic living conditions created by the adults. War and postwar children still live with trauma and the memory of shortages, especially of food. Berlin, Kinder spielen in Trümmern

Hunger and bad hygiene took its toll on kids, as I found in a Health Office report of the city of Düsseldorf from 1946. It broke down its report into three sections, and I’ll do that here:

a) Babies: Infant mortality in North Rhine-Westphalia was at 8,5 deaths per 100 births. (As comparison, there were 6,1 deaths per 100 births in 1939). Of the babies who made it into the world, many were underweight and often ill. Milk was hard to come by, and the most ruthless black marketeers sometimes added water to milk to stretch it. In the cold months, infant deaths rose also because households didn’t have any coal for heat. Mothers couldn’t bath their children as often as they needed, and cloth diapers couldn’t be washed and dried adequately.

b) Preschool children: The Health Office reported these children were in worse shape than they were in 1945. Underweight, easily tired, physically weak, anemic. They fell victim to infections and tuberkulosis.

c) School children: They were pale, physically weak, underweight and often had problems in physical development that led to bad posture or gross motor skills. They got sick easily. They had trouble concentrating in school, and on a daily basis, 10 percent of kids didn’t show up to school because they didn’t have proper shoes or clothes. Along with all of the above, teenagers were nervous and apathetic.

Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0803-519 / CC-BY-SA via ttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Wikimedia Commons

Hunger Winter

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

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In 1946/1947, Germany — and much of Europe — experienced one of the hardest winters in memory. It came to be called the Hungerwinter in German.

Life in the ruins became nearly unbearable for many. Especially in the Ruhr area where I’ve done most of my research, the food situation was catastrophic. Record low temperatures froze the waterways so that ships with perishable foods imported from abroad were trapped in the harbors. A bad harvest meant less fresh food sent from the agricultural parts of Germany to the cities. In Essen, it’s said the actual ration people received amounted to just over 700 calories a day per person.

A coal shortage, due only in part to the coal exported by the Allies from the Ruhr region, meant people had trouble heating their homes. The “White Death,” as the Germans called it, took its victims. How many people died as a result of hunger, cold and illness in this period isn’t clear. Some historians estimate hundreds of thousands.

German public television produced an interesting docu-drama on this, so interesting to me that I bought the book based on the show. Hungerwinter: Überleben nach dem Krieg links the fate of several different families over that winter.