Summary: Food Rations During The Holocaust

Natalie Wilt

English II, B8

Mrs. Scott

April 27, 2015

Food Rations During the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel once said, "Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time." Food rations during the holocaust were close to nothing. People within the work camps were given just enough food to still be able to work. But even then, the portion size was astronomically low. During the Holocaust, food was sparse and what they did get for food was tasteless and unfilling.

During the day the prisoners were given food, maybe, three times a day (“Clothing” 1). That was only if it was a labor camp, because in death camps they only gave you food so that you were

strong enough to dig your own graves. In the morning the prisoners were given coffee that really just tasted like water (“Glossary” 2). For lunch the inmates were given what was supposed to be turnip and potato soup (“Nutrition” 1). For dinner “three hundred grams of black bread,... and a tiny piece of sausage” was given (“Meals” 1). People within the camp were given a small ration of bread that was supposed to last them the entire night (“Glossary” 2). It was practically impossible not to eat it, since the bread was the only thing that was able to take up space in their stomachs. The amount of food they got was ridiculously small.
If each inmate only ate the little amount of food given to them it would only be “enough for a person to remain alive for only three months” (“Meals” 1).

The Germans were told that the prisoners were given 1,700 calories and for prisoners doing major work they got. 2,150 calories a day (“Nutrition” 1). In reality, the people were only getting a calorie intake of 1,300-1,700 calories (“Nutrition” 1). In some camps soup was the main food option. Even though it was the only option they only got about twenty five ounces of it (“Glossary” 2). They got one loaf of bread that was supposed to last them eight days (“Starvation Rations” 4). In some of the nicer camps the men were served one bowl oatmeal also known as Kasha. The oatmeal was usually only given inside of the labor camps, since the men were being used for work and needed to be stronger than normal (Solzhenitsyn 36). Over the entire twelve years of the Holocaust none of the camp prisoners received any fruit, butter, milk , or eggs (“Starvation Rations”

3).
The types of food given were poor quality and not filling. The main item of food was soup because it was cheap and could be passed as a food item even though it was mainly just water. “Watery soup and four pieces of potatoes…” (“Starvation Rations” 1), was what the people in the Lodz Ghetto got to eat for almost every meal. The prisoners in the camps would pray for just a sliver of any type of meat, they didn’t care if it was horse (“Starvation Rations” 5), cow, or even in some cases, dog meat. The men just wanted protein. In the summer time the inmates would go out and pick pieces of grass, bring them into their bunkers, cook the grass, and eat it (“Starvation Rations” 5). Sometimes mothers would tell their children that they were eating steak, in turn convincing the children to eat the grass (“Starvation Rations” 4). In the morning the camp workers would serve “imitation coffee” (“Glossary” 2), which was bitter water. Any type of vegetable that the prisoners received was either moldy or rotten (“Clothing” 2). While Ivan Denisovich was at a labor camp in the Soviet Union, he received only one bowl of oatmeal a day (Solzhenitsyn 36). The oatmeal was called Kasha because the workers could not bring themselves to even call it true oatmeal. This idea that what food was called was never even close to its true flavor or consistency was very common mindset of people in the Holocaust.
“The only thing we were talking about or thinking about was food” (“Starvation Rations” 3).

Food was one of the only things people craved in the concentration and labor camps. The struggle of never having enough food to fill your belly was the most common struggle throughout the camps. “The angel of death… was hunger” (“Starvation Rations” 1). In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a man practically killed himself when he crawled out of a role call line to get to a pot of soup (“Nutrition” 3). People would get to a point where they would do almost anything just to get a bite of food. This explains the reason why people used bread as a form of currency inside the camps (“Nutrition” 2). People would sell their clothes in the middle of winter just to get someone elses slab of bread. “We didn’t know any news of what was going on, and we didn’t think about anything else. Just food. Dreaming about food.” (“Starvation Rations” 4). Hunger was the most common disease (“Meals” 1), it became one of the most commonly treated illnesses inside the camps. Food was the most valuable thing you owned once you entered the labor or concentration camps. Starvation killed about half of the victims of the

Holocaust.
Alexander Kimel, a Holocaust survivor and book author, said “I...worry about where to find my bread”. Food rations during the Holocaust were at an all time low. If you were a strong and willing worker then you might have gotten three hundred more calories than the rest of the prisoners. Hunger lingered over all of the work and death camps. The people were being threatened by hunger, listening to it knock on their life’s door. This image and absolute horrific truth was the long and dreadful life of thousands and thousands of human beings during the years of 1933-1945.