by Joshua Malkin
As my family was assisting my grandparents move from their home of many years into a smaller apartment, my mom found my great grandmother’s World War II ration card. It was well preserved, with text in French and a grid of ration coupons (both pictured below). About 20% of the coupons were ripped out, showing that they were used.
We found many documents in my grandparents’ house, but the ration card caught my eye because it demonstrated the fear my family experienced, but also that there were people still willing to help. At a time when most countries refused to help Jewish refugees, the actions of certain people were able to save my family’s lives.
Lipman Bers and Mira Kagan, who my family calls “Bardy” and “Flippy”, were both born in Riga, Latvia. Lipman’s father ran the city’s Yiddish gymnasium. During his teenage years, Flippy got very involved in politics, joining the Jewish social democratic group the Bund. He and his friends ran an underground newspaper to speak out against the government, making him an enemy of the state. Bardy was also involved in similar political circles. After the Prime Minister of Latvia suspended the constitution and took complete power in 1934, he began targeting Social Democrats like Flippy. After his mother’s arrest, Flippy used his father-in-law’s passport to escape Latvia to Prague. However, as Czechoslovakia fell apart, Flippy and Bardy escaped to Paris for safety.
The ration card was issued to Bardy in May of 1940, two months after her daughter Ruth was born. Bardy and Flippy did not have jobs, so the ration card was one of their only steady sources of food. The May and June coupons are completely ripped out, showing constant use by Bardy. However, only weeks after the card was issued, the invasion of France by Germany began. Once Flippy could see German planes screaming over Paris, he knew it was time to go. The family moved south to the town of Tarbes, and the morning they arrived, they heard the news that the French Third Republic was surrendering to Germany.
Even with the French Government falling to the Nazis at the end of June, the ration card still has coupons missing from some of July and August. Despite the government dissolving, people were continuing to do their job so they could help others, even refugees. In his memoir, Flippy says that the mayor of Tarbes personally offered the family access to a soup kitchen. In October, the family finally got visas to the United States through the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt and others to help political refugees overcome strict limits on immigration.
Living in America today, I’ve never seriously felt the consequences of war past gas prices going up. While I understand the impact of World War 2 on my family through stories and many of the documents I’ve found, nothing has put me more in their shoes than the ration card. I was able to see how the war was directly affecting their lives, forcing them and many others to rely on rations to survive. I can’t even begin to understand how scary it must have been to have their main source of food endangered by the fact that the government that was meant to protect them no longer existed. The ration card stuck out to me because you can see each time Bardy used a coupon to feed her family. Each time she used it, she relied on the support of others. For such a small document, the ration card was able to display the weight of the war on my great grandparents. It shows me the reason why I’m alive: because there were people willing to help them. When you are in a comfortable position, it’s easy to forget how we depend on others, both governmental systems and ordinary people, for everything — even where our next meal is coming from.
