This chapter discusses the daily experience of hunger in the ghettos. It explores the myriad of coping mechanisms employed by those in the ghetto to combat hunger. This chapter discusses how individuals, families, and communities sought to increase the amount of food available. It discusses the sale of assets to obtain food and the preparation and consumption of hunger foods. This chapter reviews ways in which hunger drove individuals to behave in ways that challenged their core beliefs in terms of how they behaved, what they were willing to eat, and how they interacted with one another.

This chapter discusses the various factors that determined one’s socioeconomic position in the ghetto and the relationship between that status and food access. It explores the ways in which these various factors might intersect and benefit or impede access to food resources. Relative wealth and poverty before the war, social networks, geographical location before and during the war, gender and religious identity are each explored.

After the armistice on the Western Front in 1918, the United States provided major food aid programs across Central and Eastern Europe. The American Relief Administration and the American Red Cross rushed into these fragile new nation-states where violence was ongoing with programs aimed largely at children. The JDC jumped aboard other American emergency relief efforts, which helped it reach Poland and later Russia, where Jews were in greatest need. Deployed around Europe, American Jews distributed emergency food relief, medicines, sanitary supplies, and clothing during harsh winters. Much like American postwar diplomacy carried out by the ARA and through private loans with tacit and direct support from the US government, Jewish “diplomacy” was carried out by the JDC, a private humanitarian association. American Jews led the way for American humanitarians of all kinds: as food remitters and as the first American organization in Soviet Russia. American Jewish relief paradoxically appeared as a peripheral humanitarian undertaking and as a central partner in the main humanitarian projects of the day.