Pandemic
SW: Almost on a daily basis, living space became tighter and tighter. Food became scarcer. They had a ration system that kept on reducing the amount of food you were allowed each week. This was also something that I found out later on, that in the beginning the ration allowed for something, the equivalent of 1500 calories. Towards the end, the calorie count was 750. Can you imagine? People who couldn’t somehow supplement their diets on the black market, or if they couldn’t grow something or whatever, literally died from hunger, the lack of hygiene: because of no running water, no hygiene. The latrines got filled. You can imagine how that is.
We had one pandemic, what they would call nowadays; it was typhoid fever, which was very contagious, very deadly, in those days without penicillin. I know that for a fact. I was sick with a fever, I was hallucinating, and the only reason that I survived was because of the family that took care of me, fed me. But many people just died in the streets.