Lmao 2.5kg of meat? Forget it. If you got any, it was a day to celebrate. You couldn’t get shit for stamps and you had to stand in long queues to get the scraps that you could get. You waited for hours for a delivery that immediately disappeared or didn’t come at all. You literally bought what you could. People used to barter the stamps and a grey market to get what you needed popped up. The only way to get what you wanted was to pay with dollars.
My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.
Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.
Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I’ve ever met said “lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!”
The Soviet Union was a fun place. People whose great grandparents happened to be German were put on a train to Kyrgistan and just dumped out onto the steppe.
The 50% who survived the first winter and actually managed to build up villages were later banned from buying or selling at the local market, forcing them into the black market to survive, which was obviously illegal as well.
But they weren’t allowed to emigrate to Germany either.
Note - a shitload of rambling below and going off topic, but worth a read.
Too young for that, but my brothers, parents and grandma lived through it. There’s plenty of articles available about that shit though, if you want more sources. Personal stories like they somehow got a hold of licorice. I don’t know if they managed to get it / it was available, or if they got it from my uncle who managed to move to West Germany. So my eldest brother went to my grandpa and asked him “grandpa, do you want these sweets?”. Grandpa wasn’t one to throw away food, so he said sure. Bro then went “is it good?” “Yeah it’s good” “cause I gave it to the dog and he hated it”.
My second oldest bro bit the dog and told him (slurring his speech cause he was missing teeth at the time) “now you know how it feels”. They both were hatching a plan to go into a “scary” basement together in the house. So the second oldest went “dude, you go down there first and scream if there’s something scary so I can run”.
I remember my parents telling me about how they got their car - the legendary Fiat 126p, “maluch” or “little guy”. They were pretty well off, dad was a “supervisor of supervisors” in a mine - I’d compare it to middle management in an IT company? There were miners, “sztygars” (direct supervisors, safety inspectors directly next to the miners) and he was a “nadsztygar” which is “oversztygar”.
If you want a “folk” song from Silesia - check out “Eye of the sztajger” by kabaret Nol Nejm - it’s a song about a lazy miner who slept behind the digging combine (industrial machinery underground to dig the coal). He dreamt up a “leprechaun” type of figure appearing to him. Miners have a folk tale of “Skarbek” - a legendary figure that shows miners where “treasure lies” - not gold, but “still reflective / shiny - black gold” - of course meaning good quality coal. So Skarbek pops up in his dream, offerring him “something that’s reflective / shiny like gold” and he takes it. He later gets caught by the “sztajger” (i.e. sztygar), shows his bag and he’s been stealing lightbulbs lmao. Everything to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger” and the chorus going on about “eye of the Sztajger - sees everything, knows everything, has a notepad and notes everything, I’m telling you, crouched tiger, hidden dragon, he’s not James Bond, he’s not Kloss he’s an eyeeeee, of the sztajger”.
Kloss was another spy-figure, agent J-23, a polish spy that assumed the identity of a captured by the soviets german officer of the Abwher - german intelligence. A very popular TV series in PRL (polish people’s republic, Poland under the soviet regime).
For an actual folk song (and not a meme) alternatively listen to FEET - Maglownia which is about a dude that has to wring out wet clothes his wife just washed. He wants to go play soccer with the boys after “szychta” (shift, usually in the mines), but his wife catches him and he has to “turn and turn and wring it out and getting pissed off, turn and turn, no way out, I’m not a dude that argues a lot, turn and turn, like an idiot, maybe I’ll get to buy a halba? (0.5l, usually of vodka), turn and turn, I got blisters, I’ve had enough wringing”. This one is incredibly catchy, you’ve been warned lol.
I got more stories from WW2, since grandma talked about it a lot in her older years. My dad was always rolling his eyes going “aight grandma, sure that happened”. I had grandpa’s parachuting wings from after WW2, sadly no number on them left for the amts of jumps. Now my niece has em in “her” lego bucket which was mine when I was a kid.
We have “A bridge too far” by Cornelius Ryan. It’s completely unglued now, but the back of it has grandpa’s address on it, when he was in an artillery battery going with the allies. He had something to do with Market Garden, but I don’t remember what - for sure he didn’t jump.
Fav story is Grandpa Johann (grandma was German, Johann was Polish, this is from her POV). They lived in Knurów, which is like a stones throw away from Gliwice (Gleiwitz) where everything started. A year before 1939 grandpa Johann and like four of his buddies were going to “guard the border” - get shitfaced drunk in the mornings, wearing “the uniforms from the uprising” (I’d assume the Silesian uprisings 1919 - 1921). They had one mauser and a pistol among the five of them. He also had a second uniform at home when the one got inevitably dirty from them being shitfaced drunk and rolling on the ground in the mud. They might’ve had more weapons each, but only brought one in turn, guess they didn’t want to carry too much, and just have an excuse why they’re away from their nagging wives.
Then 1st of September, 39’ came. Grandma was cooking something and suddenly she heard “szzzzip, szzzzzip, szzzzzzzip”. First thing she thought was “fucking Johann pissing off the German army again” (she used a regional word which could roughly be translated to “poke”, but more in a sense of Steve Irwin in South Park “jamming a thumb up its ass” type of poke). Then she saw grandpa Johann in his full glory, jumping over fences. She said “how mighty he looked, fit like a gazelle, only slightly stumbling from the vodka”. Then she noticed the Germans in “their beautiful long coats, with even longer carabines”. She said they went after Johann and his buddies, but by the time they cleared the first fence with their long coats and guns “the mighty Johann Gazzelle was so deep in the woods they never found him”. She panicked, grabbed the second uniform he had and stuffed it into the small oven for cooking, so it’d burn down. She also grabbed the pistol he had (and didn’t bring to the border for some reason lol) and threw it into the septic tank / the shitter. The small oven choked on the heavy, wool uniform and started smoking the entire house. The germans came to see what’s happening and to put out the possible fire. Luckily she was german, so in perfect “Dojcz” (deutsch, german) she told them that it’s fine and to fuck off lol.
Dad doubted grandma till one faithful day they were connecting the house to a working sewer system and didn’t need the septic tank. So they pumped it out and found remains of a pistol, almost completely rusted through, but the shape was unmistakable.
Later grandpa was hauled off by Wehrmacht and forced to fight on some front (don’t know which one, probably western). He had leave, went back to Knurow and married my grandma “so she could get some money from the government in case he gets killed”. He later got captured by the allies and they started talking to him in german. Obviously he knew some (since silesian has a lot of german words in it, as evident by some of my explanations of words above). They asked him where he’s from, he said Gleiwitz. “But that’s Poland” “yes” and then the dude, in perfect Polish went “why the fuck are we speaking German then?” “You tell me”. So he enlisted with the allies. My mum and brother made a map of where he went for a history project for highschool, dude basically went all over Europe including Italy IIRC? It was weird as fuck. Sadly I have shown this to my middle school teacher, he took it and forgot to give it back. But yeah, grandpa survived the war, went back to Grandma and my dad was born in 1950. No idea if either of my uncles were older or nah, maybe a year or two?
My maternal grandpa defended the bells of a local church during WW1 from being taken away by the germans and melted into ammunition. They were from the XVth century. There was a wooden church there, built in 1447. In 1723 they built a second wooden church in place of the old one, that burned down during WW2. The bells survived till today and have recently been shown off to the public and rung again, for some occasion. I think it might’ve been 90 years of the opening of the new church. If interested, google “popielow dzwony” - popielow is the village name. They defended the bells, then took them and burrowed them somewhere, then dug them up after the war and returned them to the parish.
Also my dad has a notepad from his youth full of stupid rhymes, jokes and naughty puns which I recently found in the basement. He said not to read it so we stopped, but not before hearing the best pickup line ever. “Mis” means “teddy” or “small bear”. “Misie” is plural. “Mi sie” means “for/to me”. So you ask “have you heard the tale of three little bears? You look good to me, take off your clothes for me, give yourself to me”. In polish it’s “podobasz misie, rozbierz misie, oddaj misie”.
Edit: also check a comment I replied to this comment, about german citizenship and us being a family of traitors lol
Also, there was a joke that firefighters don’t put out barns in Silesia, especially in “Barns”. Barns is a village (now district of Rybnik) literally named “Barns” - Stodoly. They had a smithy there in XVIth century. The reasons the firemen stayed away, was post WW1 nobody gave up their guns and ammo, they hid it in their barns. So everytime a fire happened, a literal arsenal was burning and cooking off, so they stayed away, contained the blaze and let it burn out
Also, Stodoly was a second spot where germans started a provocation - they got SS troops on thr 31st of August 39’ in Polish uniforms to take a border office, then brought a second squad of SS troops, dressed in german uniforms, then brought corpses from a concentration camp dressed in both Polish and German uniforms to “legitimize” a supposed “Polish” attack.
Holy fuck I forgot the best part of the Johann story. My dad devoutly learned German, probably because of the connection with his mum (he loved her very much, he promised her he wouldn’t sell the house they lived in, and even in his old age he goes there to groundskeep, restore the house and he’ll be doing this till he cannot anymore he said). I’d say he was about as “germanpilled” as possible - also seeing how well his brother did in West Germany. So he thought he’ll get us all german citizenship. We didn’t mind, it’s in our blood, grandma was German after all, and double citizenship is a thing. So he went through the entire process, getting us all citizenship. We had to go to the embassy, pics in hand, show up with the entire family, give fingerprints n’shit. About a year later, we get six letters from the embassy. All of them the same, all addressed to a different person in the family. We check them out, we all got the citizenship, yay! Except the dad looks like he saw a ghost. Then he starts laughing like crazy. We ask him what’s up - turns out his was rejected. Because he was too close in relation to someone who “betrayer the german state and deserted the army”. We were like “wtf, who???”. Turns out, the german state was the 3rd reich, and the army was wehrmacht, when grandpa Johann joined the allies lmao. So now the only person who really wanted the citizenship didn’t get it, because grandpa was a traitor to Hitler
Authoritarian dictatorships that move wealth and power to the top at the expense of the peopel don’t work. “Communism” is barely on the radar, you can stick whatever label you want on it.
Lmao 2.5kg of meat? Forget it. If you got any, it was a day to celebrate. You couldn’t get shit for stamps and you had to stand in long queues to get the scraps that you could get. You waited for hours for a delivery that immediately disappeared or didn’t come at all. You literally bought what you could. People used to barter the stamps and a grey market to get what you needed popped up. The only way to get what you wanted was to pay with dollars.
You sound like you were actually there? If so, please continue.
My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.
Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.
Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I’ve ever met said “lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!”
“Ooooohhhhh yyyeeaaaaahhhh…”
The Soviet Union was a fun place. People whose great grandparents happened to be German were put on a train to Kyrgistan and just dumped out onto the steppe.
The 50% who survived the first winter and actually managed to build up villages were later banned from buying or selling at the local market, forcing them into the black market to survive, which was obviously illegal as well.
But they weren’t allowed to emigrate to Germany either.
In the 90‘s they were allowed. And Germany welcomed them.
“would you like your tea with no milk or no cream?”
And no tea?
Note - a shitload of rambling below and going off topic, but worth a read.
Too young for that, but my brothers, parents and grandma lived through it. There’s plenty of articles available about that shit though, if you want more sources. Personal stories like they somehow got a hold of licorice. I don’t know if they managed to get it / it was available, or if they got it from my uncle who managed to move to West Germany. So my eldest brother went to my grandpa and asked him “grandpa, do you want these sweets?”. Grandpa wasn’t one to throw away food, so he said sure. Bro then went “is it good?” “Yeah it’s good” “cause I gave it to the dog and he hated it”. My second oldest bro bit the dog and told him (slurring his speech cause he was missing teeth at the time) “now you know how it feels”. They both were hatching a plan to go into a “scary” basement together in the house. So the second oldest went “dude, you go down there first and scream if there’s something scary so I can run”.
I remember my parents telling me about how they got their car - the legendary Fiat 126p, “maluch” or “little guy”. They were pretty well off, dad was a “supervisor of supervisors” in a mine - I’d compare it to middle management in an IT company? There were miners, “sztygars” (direct supervisors, safety inspectors directly next to the miners) and he was a “nadsztygar” which is “oversztygar”.
If you want a “folk” song from Silesia - check out “Eye of the sztajger” by kabaret Nol Nejm - it’s a song about a lazy miner who slept behind the digging combine (industrial machinery underground to dig the coal). He dreamt up a “leprechaun” type of figure appearing to him. Miners have a folk tale of “Skarbek” - a legendary figure that shows miners where “treasure lies” - not gold, but “still reflective / shiny - black gold” - of course meaning good quality coal. So Skarbek pops up in his dream, offerring him “something that’s reflective / shiny like gold” and he takes it. He later gets caught by the “sztajger” (i.e. sztygar), shows his bag and he’s been stealing lightbulbs lmao. Everything to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger” and the chorus going on about “eye of the Sztajger - sees everything, knows everything, has a notepad and notes everything, I’m telling you, crouched tiger, hidden dragon, he’s not James Bond, he’s not Kloss he’s an eyeeeee, of the sztajger”.
Kloss was another spy-figure, agent J-23, a polish spy that assumed the identity of a captured by the soviets german officer of the Abwher - german intelligence. A very popular TV series in PRL (polish people’s republic, Poland under the soviet regime).
For an actual folk song (and not a meme) alternatively listen to FEET - Maglownia which is about a dude that has to wring out wet clothes his wife just washed. He wants to go play soccer with the boys after “szychta” (shift, usually in the mines), but his wife catches him and he has to “turn and turn and wring it out and getting pissed off, turn and turn, no way out, I’m not a dude that argues a lot, turn and turn, like an idiot, maybe I’ll get to buy a halba? (0.5l, usually of vodka), turn and turn, I got blisters, I’ve had enough wringing”. This one is incredibly catchy, you’ve been warned lol.
I got more stories from WW2, since grandma talked about it a lot in her older years. My dad was always rolling his eyes going “aight grandma, sure that happened”. I had grandpa’s parachuting wings from after WW2, sadly no number on them left for the amts of jumps. Now my niece has em in “her” lego bucket which was mine when I was a kid.
We have “A bridge too far” by Cornelius Ryan. It’s completely unglued now, but the back of it has grandpa’s address on it, when he was in an artillery battery going with the allies. He had something to do with Market Garden, but I don’t remember what - for sure he didn’t jump.
Fav story is Grandpa Johann (grandma was German, Johann was Polish, this is from her POV). They lived in Knurów, which is like a stones throw away from Gliwice (Gleiwitz) where everything started. A year before 1939 grandpa Johann and like four of his buddies were going to “guard the border” - get shitfaced drunk in the mornings, wearing “the uniforms from the uprising” (I’d assume the Silesian uprisings 1919 - 1921). They had one mauser and a pistol among the five of them. He also had a second uniform at home when the one got inevitably dirty from them being shitfaced drunk and rolling on the ground in the mud. They might’ve had more weapons each, but only brought one in turn, guess they didn’t want to carry too much, and just have an excuse why they’re away from their nagging wives.
Then 1st of September, 39’ came. Grandma was cooking something and suddenly she heard “szzzzip, szzzzzip, szzzzzzzip”. First thing she thought was “fucking Johann pissing off the German army again” (she used a regional word which could roughly be translated to “poke”, but more in a sense of Steve Irwin in South Park “jamming a thumb up its ass” type of poke). Then she saw grandpa Johann in his full glory, jumping over fences. She said “how mighty he looked, fit like a gazelle, only slightly stumbling from the vodka”. Then she noticed the Germans in “their beautiful long coats, with even longer carabines”. She said they went after Johann and his buddies, but by the time they cleared the first fence with their long coats and guns “the mighty Johann Gazzelle was so deep in the woods they never found him”. She panicked, grabbed the second uniform he had and stuffed it into the small oven for cooking, so it’d burn down. She also grabbed the pistol he had (and didn’t bring to the border for some reason lol) and threw it into the septic tank / the shitter. The small oven choked on the heavy, wool uniform and started smoking the entire house. The germans came to see what’s happening and to put out the possible fire. Luckily she was german, so in perfect “Dojcz” (deutsch, german) she told them that it’s fine and to fuck off lol.
Dad doubted grandma till one faithful day they were connecting the house to a working sewer system and didn’t need the septic tank. So they pumped it out and found remains of a pistol, almost completely rusted through, but the shape was unmistakable.
Later grandpa was hauled off by Wehrmacht and forced to fight on some front (don’t know which one, probably western). He had leave, went back to Knurow and married my grandma “so she could get some money from the government in case he gets killed”. He later got captured by the allies and they started talking to him in german. Obviously he knew some (since silesian has a lot of german words in it, as evident by some of my explanations of words above). They asked him where he’s from, he said Gleiwitz. “But that’s Poland” “yes” and then the dude, in perfect Polish went “why the fuck are we speaking German then?” “You tell me”. So he enlisted with the allies. My mum and brother made a map of where he went for a history project for highschool, dude basically went all over Europe including Italy IIRC? It was weird as fuck. Sadly I have shown this to my middle school teacher, he took it and forgot to give it back. But yeah, grandpa survived the war, went back to Grandma and my dad was born in 1950. No idea if either of my uncles were older or nah, maybe a year or two?
My maternal grandpa defended the bells of a local church during WW1 from being taken away by the germans and melted into ammunition. They were from the XVth century. There was a wooden church there, built in 1447. In 1723 they built a second wooden church in place of the old one, that burned down during WW2. The bells survived till today and have recently been shown off to the public and rung again, for some occasion. I think it might’ve been 90 years of the opening of the new church. If interested, google “popielow dzwony” - popielow is the village name. They defended the bells, then took them and burrowed them somewhere, then dug them up after the war and returned them to the parish.
Also my dad has a notepad from his youth full of stupid rhymes, jokes and naughty puns which I recently found in the basement. He said not to read it so we stopped, but not before hearing the best pickup line ever. “Mis” means “teddy” or “small bear”. “Misie” is plural. “Mi sie” means “for/to me”. So you ask “have you heard the tale of three little bears? You look good to me, take off your clothes for me, give yourself to me”. In polish it’s “podobasz misie, rozbierz misie, oddaj misie”.
Edit: also check a comment I replied to this comment, about german citizenship and us being a family of traitors lol
Also, there was a joke that firefighters don’t put out barns in Silesia, especially in “Barns”. Barns is a village (now district of Rybnik) literally named “Barns” - Stodoly. They had a smithy there in XVIth century. The reasons the firemen stayed away, was post WW1 nobody gave up their guns and ammo, they hid it in their barns. So everytime a fire happened, a literal arsenal was burning and cooking off, so they stayed away, contained the blaze and let it burn out
Also, Stodoly was a second spot where germans started a provocation - they got SS troops on thr 31st of August 39’ in Polish uniforms to take a border office, then brought a second squad of SS troops, dressed in german uniforms, then brought corpses from a concentration camp dressed in both Polish and German uniforms to “legitimize” a supposed “Polish” attack.
Holy fuck I forgot the best part of the Johann story. My dad devoutly learned German, probably because of the connection with his mum (he loved her very much, he promised her he wouldn’t sell the house they lived in, and even in his old age he goes there to groundskeep, restore the house and he’ll be doing this till he cannot anymore he said). I’d say he was about as “germanpilled” as possible - also seeing how well his brother did in West Germany. So he thought he’ll get us all german citizenship. We didn’t mind, it’s in our blood, grandma was German after all, and double citizenship is a thing. So he went through the entire process, getting us all citizenship. We had to go to the embassy, pics in hand, show up with the entire family, give fingerprints n’shit. About a year later, we get six letters from the embassy. All of them the same, all addressed to a different person in the family. We check them out, we all got the citizenship, yay! Except the dad looks like he saw a ghost. Then he starts laughing like crazy. We ask him what’s up - turns out his was rejected. Because he was too close in relation to someone who “betrayer the german state and deserted the army”. We were like “wtf, who???”. Turns out, the german state was the 3rd reich, and the army was wehrmacht, when grandpa Johann joined the allies lmao. So now the only person who really wanted the citizenship didn’t get it, because grandpa was a traitor to Hitler
That was a wild ride. Man, such a great comment chain
I had the opportunity to visit Russia in 1987 at the hight of the USSR. It was a hell-hole. Communism doesn’t work.
Authoritarian dictatorships that move wealth and power to the top at the expense of the peopel don’t work. “Communism” is barely on the radar, you can stick whatever label you want on it.
1987 certainly wasn’t the height of the USSR
I had the opportunity to visit Detroit in 2017 at the height of the USA. It was a hell-hole. Capitalism doesn’t work.
Who the fuck is down oting this on Lemmy?
People sick of the “Capitalism Bad” circlejerk when the alternative isn’t much better as shown in the above post.
Capitalists!