Food, Money and Barter in the Lvov Ghetto, Eastern Galicia

Abstract

“All the adults looked sad most of the time now. Food was becoming hard to get” noted in her memoir Nelly S. Toll. As a child she spent the war years in Lvov, Eastern Galicia (Lviv, today in Ukraine), first in the ghetto and then in hiding. Toll’s account and other accounts of Jewish survivors reveal the role of age, class and gender in developing survival strategies and in acquiring food. This article examines early postwar testimonies, diaries, memoirs, and oral interviews to discuss how survivors remember and describe the food crisis in the Lvov Ghetto. It explores how food deprivation and hunger shaped the daily lives of Jews. It seeks to examine how families used their financial resources and build social networks to gain access to food.

This chapter comes from my study of Jewish daily life in hiding in Eastern Galicia during the German occupation. Research for it was partially carried out during a Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellowship at the USHMM in Washington D.C. The author would like to thank Eliyana R. Adler, Winson Chu, Marion Kaplan, Anna Novikov, Katarzyna Person, Helene Sinnreich, Joanna Śliwa, Agnieszka Wierzcholska and Anna Wylęgała for their comments on this chapter.