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

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”

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