A 9-year-old boy from Amsterdam during the Dutch famine better known as "winter hunger" from 1944 to 45. Many children carried spoons with them wherever they went "just in case".

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image showing A 9-year-old boy from Amsterdam during the Dutch famine better known as "winter hunger" from 1944 to 45. Many children carried spoons with them wherever they went "just in case".

fretnbel on October 29th, 2019 at 09:38 UTC »

Terrible terrible. Remember seeing that picture as a kid and got sick from it.

What was the main cause?

As far as I knew it only affected northern NL.

Was it because it was still under German occupation?

DutchMedium013 on October 29th, 2019 at 09:55 UTC »

A previous client of mine lived through this, her father worked at a factory and fed the kids from his neighborhood because that was all the kids could get. She talked a lot about those meals.

MaFataGer on October 29th, 2019 at 11:18 UTC »

God, first I just focused on the boy in the foreground but when I saw the family in the back it made me think of the fate of the mother. What do you do if you cannot feed your 6 children anymore? Every bite of food you get you have to carefully consider who gets how much. What if it's still not enough, do you give up on one child, maybe suffocate your baby to stop it's suffering? Give a child away to work for food or into an orphanage? I cannot imagine having to make those decisions to get as many children through it as you can...

My grandfather was given away as a kid because his mother couldn't feed him but this was in a rural area that must have been quite some better off than in this picture, what a horrible time...