Here’s an explanation for those of you who read the last post and thought: “Ha! How can she say a tire could go for 4 or 5 American dollars? They didn’t use American dollars in occupied Europe.” You’re right. No German occupation authority would recognize an American dollar as legal tender. (At least not officially, I can’t say when it comes to bribes.) You could not plunk down a couple of dollars at a ticket booth in the Gare du Nord and ask for a round-trip berth to Toulouse without having to answer some awkward questions posed by the police.

But we’ve already established that the economy was not functioning according to the usual rules of legal tender. If you happened to have some American dollars saved from a pre-war trip or perhaps from a letter sent by a relative, you could find ways to spend them on the clandestine markets. After all, after the German defeat at Stalingrad more and more people were willing to bet on the Allies winning the war. In fact, Jean Weidner had a whole pocketful of international money with him on a trip into Switzerland in 1943, including American dollars and British pounds sterling. He or his resistance colleagues had agreed to exchange the “enemy” currency for the local currency in either France or Belgian as a way of helping fugitives escape through a place where everything had to be paid for in cash. (The Swiss confiscated all his money but later returned it after considerable paperwork.)

Most people, of course, did not have American or British money sitting around. And many of them, such as the wives of French POWs who had been sitting in POW camps since 1940, were short on French francs as well.

It’s no wonder then that some French women collected their tobacco ration not because they smoked but because they needed it to buy food. A cigarette was a known quantity that everyone could agree on. If the seller accepted cigarettes in payment, he or she did not have to worry about exchange rates or currency devaluations. Cigarettes would not lose value and could be traded for another item. France never reached the state of economic disintegration in which cigarettes replaced money as Germany did in 1945. But a Dutch-Paris courier bought a carton of cigarettes to buy and bribe his was across the country in the tumultuous summer of 1944. He recorded the purchase in his expense account although he did not itemize how he spent the cigarettes.

Given all this – the fragmentation of the economy into very local markets, the loss of confidence in the government and its rationing and currency, the prevalence of an array of alternative methods of trading and payment (barter, black market, gray market) – it’s extremely difficult to convert 1943 prices into 2021 dollars. Or even 1943 dollars for that matter. But I wonder how useful that would even be. That world of rationing, shortages and barter was so very different from our own world of credit cards and online shopping. Isn’t it enough to understand the daily circumstances of finding food, heating and clothing to appreciate how difficult the occupation was for all citizens whether or not they were with the resistance?