Following the last post about the difficulties of determining wartime exchange rates for currency, some of you are probably wondering why historians don’t just compare bread basket prices. It’s a good idea except that once again you run into the huge divide between the official story and daily life in the fractured markets of occupied Europe.

Relying on official rations to determine what people ate or how much they spent on food is problematical. This is glaringly obvious in a place like Poland where anyone who ate only official rations would have starved to death within months. The situation was not quite as desperate in France or Belgium. But the rations were lean there too, and the fact that a rationing bureaucracy said that people of a certain category could have so much butter or so many grams of bread at such and such a price did not mean that either butter or bread were actually available for purchase at that or any price.

Given the problems in the official supply chain, many civilians felt they had no choice but to slip into highly individual and localized systems of barter or use the black market. Indeed, black market prices are a far more reliable measure of prices and values during the war than any official rates. There are, however, some obvious problems. In the first place, the black market was illegal and mostly off the books. In the second place, the black market does not refer to some concrete trading center along the lines of the New York Stock Exchange. There were places where black market traders congregated in certain cities, but even there deals were struck between individual buyers and sellers.

To further complicate any attempt to figure out values during the occupation, the black market had a friendlier side known as the gray market. The line is fuzzy but let’s say that the black market was purely for profit and tended to be populated by criminals on the selling side. In that case the gray market covers all the favors done among friends, relatives and acquaintances. Your cousin sells you eggs and a ham from his farm without ration coupons and at prices that are above the official prices but much less than he could get from a professional black marketer? That’s the gray market. It could also be your hairdresser’s sister’s husband trading you a new bicycle tire for a winter coat for his nephew. So did a bicycle tire cost as much as a boy’s winter coat? Only in this one particular instance. On the black market the tire might have gone for four or five American dollars, if the buyer had dollars.

So it’s difficult to determine bread basket prices for occupied Europe. It would take some lucky discoveries in the archives. And then it would be almost too much to ask that those records of prices would cover the same time period. But any such record of local prices is better than none and could be used to give a general sense of values and costs. But it’s not really necessary. There is ample other evidence that ordinary civilians got hungrier, colder, less well clothed and shod and generally poorer over the course of the war and occupation.