A train could carry factory machinery east from the Soviet front, move a university away from a Chinese city, or bring food to an occupied Dutch province. It could also carry deportees to a killing center. The same ordinary objects appear in every place this chapter visits: a ration card, a school notebook, a shopping bag. Their meaning depended on who had the power to decide where a family could go and what it could bring.

The Soviet Union: a city under siege and an industry on the move

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet government moved factories and their workers away from the advancing front. Whole plants were dismantled, loaded onto trains and restarted in the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia, often in unheated buildings, while civilians evacuated east in their millions, including to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. A safe arrival was usually the beginning of another struggle for a bed, a job and food. Soviet women, teenagers and older men filled the factories, and compulsory overtime introduced in June 1941 stretched the working day to eleven hours or more.

In besieged Leningrad, a work assignment determined how much bread a person could claim. From 20 November to 25 December 1941, the lowest daily bread ration was 250 grams for industrial workers and 125 grams for clerks, dependents and children under twelve, according to the Central Naval Museum. Water meant a walk to the Neva, a broken pipe or a shell hole in the street. Official calls to defend the city drew on real determination, but the ration categories show whose work the authorities could feed and how little they could offer anyone else. On 9 August 1942 the Leningrad Radio Committee Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the besieged city.

Schoolgirl Tanya Savicheva used a small notebook to record the dates and times of deaths in her family during the first siege winter. Her short entries were a child’s attempt to keep a record of who was gone. She was evacuated in August 1942 and died in 1944. Her notebook shows what she knew from inside the siege; later archive records follow her beyond it. The siege, the evacuation across the frozen Lake Ladoga and the death toll are covered in this site’s Leningrad collection, and the wider Soviet war in Operation Barbarossa.

China: a capital in the hills, a university on the road

China had been fighting Japan at full scale since the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 1937, and its cities fell or were bombed years before Pearl Harbor. The massacre at Nanjing in 1937–38, described in this site’s Nanking collection, showed what occupation could mean. The Nationalist government moved inland to Chongqing, which Japanese aircraft bombed repeatedly from 1938 to 1943. Residents dug shelter tunnels into the city’s hills, but public and private shelters differed sharply in conditions. In June 1941 many hundreds of people died of suffocation and crushing in a crowded public tunnel during a raid, a disaster that exposed the inequality of protection.

Education traveled. Peking University, Tsinghua and Nankai first joined forces in Changsha and then moved to Kunming, where their combined National Southwestern Associated University taught through the war in improvised buildings. Tens of millions of Chinese civilians were displaced by fighting, flooding and famine, including the deliberate breaching of the Yellow River dikes in 1938 and the Henan famine of 1942–43. When Japan surrendered in 1945, crowds celebrated across the country; within months, civil war between the Nationalists and Communists had resumed.

Shanghai: refuge and restriction

Shanghai was one of the few places in the world that admitted Jewish refugees without a visa in the late 1930s. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum records that more than 17,000 German and Austrian Jews fled there in 1938 and 1939, joining a Russian Jewish community of about 4,000; about 2,100 Polish Jews arrived in 1940–41. They lived crowded lives in the poor district of Hongkew, alongside Chinese residents who were themselves living under Japanese occupation. On 18 February 1943 the Japanese authorities proclaimed a “designated area” in Hongkew and ordered stateless refugees who had arrived since 1937, in practice the Jewish refugees, to move into it. Passes were needed to leave. Hunger and disease were constant, but most of the refugees survived the war.

Occupied France: a promise to families and the price of a loaf

After the defeat of 1940, described in the Fall of France collection, Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime replaced the republic’s motto with Travail, Famille, Patrie (work, family, fatherland) and spread it on objects as ordinary as plates. School policy blamed the old republican system for weakening France. Meanwhile ration cards sorted buyers into categories by age and work; one Paris card allowed 275 grams of bread a day. In Lyon, women spent hours in queues for food that shops sometimes could not supply, and the city’s resistance museum shows how central women’s daily labor became. Germany took a large share of French food and industrial output, and from 1943 the compulsory labor service sent hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen to work in Germany, driving many into hiding and the maquis.

For Hélène Berr, a young Jewish woman in Paris, the diary she began in 1942 moved between music, friendship and growing persecution. The obligation to wear the yellow star intruded on an ordinary day. On 16–17 July 1942 French police arrested about 13,000 Jews in the Vél d’Hiv roundup. Collaboration had a street address and a doorbell. Berr was arrested in 1944 and died in Bergen-Belsen shortly before liberation; her diary was published in 2008.

The Netherlands: a strike, a secret annex and the Hunger Winter

On 25 February 1941 Dutch Communists called a strike in Amsterdam after German raids on Jewish men, and it spread well beyond its organizers before it was crushed. A different kind of resistance went on behind a business address on the Prinsengracht. Miep Gies helped Margot Frank reach the Secret Annex by bicycle in July 1942 and then supplied the eight people hiding there with food and books. After their arrest in August 1944, Miep and Bep Voskuijl rescued Anne Frank’s papers and kept them until the war ended. About three-quarters of the Jews in the Netherlands were murdered, one of the highest proportions in western Europe.

In the winter of 1944–45, after a railway strike called to support the Allied offensive at Arnhem, the German authorities embargoed food transport into the western Netherlands. Fuel ran out and the canals froze. The official adult ration in the large western cities fell to about 500 calories a day by April 1945. Families burned furniture and floorboards, ate tulip bulbs and sugar beets, and walked or cycled into the countryside to barter for food. Liberation Route Europe, drawing on Dutch research, puts the death toll at some 20,000 civilians. Late in April 1945, with German agreement, Allied bombers dropped food in Operations Manna and Chowhound, and Canadian troops brought in supplies after the German surrender in the Netherlands on 5 May.

Occupied Poland: the ghetto and the hidden archive

Poland’s occupation, which began with the invasion of September 1939, was the most brutal in western and central Europe. German authorities closed Polish secondary schools and universities, deported Poles for forced labor, and confined Jews to ghettos. In Warsaw they sealed the ghetto in November 1940, forcing more than 400,000 Jews into about 1.3 square miles. A food ration set by German authorities, the food people obtained through smuggling and relief, and the food a particular household ate were three different things. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum records about 83,000 deaths from hunger and disease in the ghetto between 1940 and mid-1942, before the mass deportations of that summer to Treblinka.

The historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat group gathered diaries, children’s essays, posters, ration cards and reports on daily life in the ghetto. They buried the collection in metal boxes and milk cans in 1942 and 1943, and much of it was recovered after the war. A commonplace object became the means of preserving evidence of the people the Nazi regime set out to destroy. The figures are summarized in The Holocaust by the Numbers.

Neutrals and the northern war

Even neutral countries rationed. Switzerland, surrounded by the Axis from 1940 and cut off from overseas supply, rationed food and fuel, plowed up parks and sports fields under the “Wahlen plan” to grow more food, and in May 1942 ran a special collection of nonferrous metals, with households bringing copper and brass to collection points such as one in Zürich’s Uraniastrasse. Finland, which fought the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939–40 and again from 1941, regulated fuel sales from the first days of the war in Europe; a photograph of 5 September 1939 shows cars queuing at a Helsinki filling station, and by 1940 the Ministry of Supply’s potato queues were a feature of Helsinki’s market square.

Manila, India and Australia

The Philippines, a U.S. commonwealth, was occupied by Japan from 1942 after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. President Manuel Quezon led a government in exile from Washington, while Filipinos at home endured food shortages, forced labor and reprisals, and many joined guerrilla movements. The month-long battle for Manila in February and March 1945 destroyed much of the city, including the old walled city of Intramuros, and Japanese forces massacred civilians. The number of civilian dead is commonly given as about 100,000, a figure historians have questioned; it was certainly in the tens of thousands.

About 2.5 million men served in the British Indian Army, the largest volunteer army in history. India had been made a belligerent in 1939 without consultation with its elected leaders, and the Indian National Congress launched the Quit India movement in August 1942; its leaders were arrested. In Bengal in 1943, wartime inflation, the loss of rice imports from Burma, hoarding and colonial policy produced a famine that killed millions. The artist Chittaprosad recorded what he saw in famine-struck Midnapore in drawings published as Hungry Bengal.

Australia, bombed at Darwin from February 1942 and threatened by Japanese submarines off its east coast, mobilized as fully as Britain. The Australian War Memorial records that clothing rationing was gazetted on 12 June 1942, tea on 3 July and sugar on 29 August 1942, butter in June 1943 and meat in January 1944, all through coupons surrendered before goods could be supplied. Sugar came off the ration on 3 July 1947 and clothing and meat in June 1948, but tea and butter stayed rationed until 1950. Japanese prisoners of war captured in New Guinea and the Solomons were brought to camps in Australia, including through Brisbane.

The previous chapter describes the Japanese home front; the final chapter follows soldiers and their families home after 1945, including Canadians who had liberated the Netherlands and Americans who had served in the Philippines.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Occupation, liberation and victory

Sources and further reading

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