When getting even the smallest amount of money is a matter of survival, the limit of what you can earn becomes mobile. Literally everything was traded during the Second World War. Contemporary auction sites with their oddities are nothing compared to what the merchants in occupied Poland offered.
In a literary report from the war by Aleksander Maliszewski, we can read:“What you used to legally buy in a store, you now buy illegally from your friend in a workshop, office, office or, finally, on a street or market. The entire illegal trade and industry has arisen and spread ". The scale of this practice was gigantic.
Historians estimate that in no city in occupied Europe has the black market developed on such a scale as in Warsaw. It traded in things that are sometimes hard to believe.
Coffee grounds
During the war, tea and coffee became a scarce commodity, which caused their prices to skyrocket. Due to the fact that the purchase of a can of tea or coffee could make a hole in the household budget, they stopped drinking them every day.
The tea grounds were successfully flooded many times. With a good-quality mixture, even after several treatments with boiling water, an aromatic and colorless brew was obtained.
Filter filled with coffee grounds (photo:public domain).
Meanwhile real black coffee grounds, instead of being put in the trash, went ... to the black market. Hanna Kramar-Mintkiewicz was born into an officer family. Her father was mobilized in 1939 and did not return home after the September campaign. The family's livelihood therefore fell on the shoulders of the mother who took care of baking and cooking.
As Hanna Kramat-Mintkiewicz recalled years later:
Mum did everything, and she was baking some cakes and baking some pies and delivering it to some shops, to some cafes [...]
Among the baked cakes there were also those with coffee flavor. In times of shortage, no one could afford to use real fresh coffee with them.
So in cafes you bought used coffee grounds and they ended up in the dough.
Women selling flowers and bread on one of Warsaw's streets. The photo comes from the book "Occupation from the Kitchen".
Cats for soup
In the face of the difficulties with meat supplies that prevailed in the cities of occupied Poland, many crooks appeared who wanted to earn good money from the plight of their neighbors.
Instead of risking your life to smuggle food from the countryside , they preferred to cheat their customers and force them with what they had at hand. In this way, the occupation clearly left its mark on the safety of… cats.
The fate of the domestic buzzards that fell into the hands of such a crook was sealed. They lost their heads very quickly, were skinned and stripped of their tail and paws, and landed on a market stall as a rabbit carcass. In a sense, the culinary tradition of previous centuries has returned to favor ... .
Merchants stone-faced praised the fresh meat, saying that it was perfect for a stew. In this way, the Warsaw insurgent Wiesław Lechowicz, among others, was fooled. Years later, he recalled his transaction:
I paid what she wanted for a rabbit under her arm and quickly back. I brought this rabbit. Everyone believed it was a rabbit, I also believed it was a rabbit. But there was one that he recognized said, "Look, you bought a cat, not a rabbit."
Pips
It may seem somewhat surprising that household war guides advised collecting fruit pips.
They had to be collected in small bags or pouches, sorted according to species.
At home, they could be used to prepare liqueurs, but by going to the market you could make a better deal on them.
As Halina Bielińska and Maria Krüger wrote in their book during the occupation, “Don't throw your money out the window. A guide for the lady of the house ”:
Before the war, the selling price of apple seeds was around PLN 60 per kilogram. You can safely entrust the collection of this garbage to the children.
Women trading herring. The photo comes from the book "Occupation from the Kitchen".
There was, however, one major problem with the seeds. If you wanted to buy them or trade them, you could buy something else by misunderstanding. After all, in the chatter of occupation, stones were called ... cartridges.
Turtles for meat
Not only Poles traded on the black market. A large part of the goods got into the illegal circulation at the initiative of corrupt Germans, who thus earned extra money on the side.
It was through them that Polish traders bought several wagons full of food transported to the Wehrmacht factories. Warsaw crooks bought a pig in a poke, which they found out when, after opening them, it turned out that the wagons were full of ... turtles transported from southern Europe to be turned into canned food.
It is hard to imagine how the relatives of this little turtle flooded the marketplaces of occupied Warsaw on one day (photo published under the CCA-BY SA 4.0 license, author of Dsabba77)
Poles did not lose heart. Instead of panicking, they immediately put the animals on sale. Some bought them as exotic pets, the rest just wanted to eat them. The real turtle soup appeared in the menu of Warsaw's restaurants, and not the counterfeit "turtle soup" made of veal tongues so far. An ordinary Varsovian could try such delicacies in his own home. It was enough to go to Kercelego Square to get a fresh turtle.
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The article was based on materials collected by the author while writing the book "Occupation from the kitchen".
"Okupacja od Kuchni" is a moving story about the times when illegal pig slaughtering could lead to Auschwitz, vegetables were grown in the courtyards of tenement houses, and used coffee grounds were traded on the black market.