The past month has brought severe cold and snow to the Eastern and Midwestern United States this year — but it can’t hold a candle to the winter of 1940 in bomb-battered Warsaw!

In her book The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt, author Rulka Langer describes the beginning of 1940, following the German invasion and occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939. She stayed in Warsaw with her elderly mother and two young children (George, age 8, and Ania, age 3), while her husband was in the U.S. in a diplomatic post. They were fortunate that their flat was not totally destroyed, as so many other buildings had been during the 4-week Siege of Warsaw in September. But there were many new challenges:

Chapter 32, pp. 412–417:

The New Year brought many things.

In the first place, it brought a terrific cold wave. As a matter of fact, the temperature had already dropped below zero a few days before Christmas, but at first we all believed that this was just one of those cold spells that lasts for a week or so and is followed by slushy, misty days — the typical January flu weather. We were wrong.

Weeks passed and the terrific cold did not relent. For two full months the temperature never even reached the zero mark and twice fell to thirty below….

No one had much coal left and new supplies were not forthcoming — the cold wave had disorganized transportation facilities, we were told. And the Germans had requisitioned for their own use all the remaining coal stocks.

In our own house the temperature hovered around forty degrees Fahrenheit, and often in the morning fell to the freezing point. George’s hands and feet were frostbitten, Ania cried bitterly every night when she was undressed to go to bed. We all had bad coughs, but no one even tried to do anything about it. What is the use of medicine when you can’t get warm? And even though we kept our fur coats on all day long it didn’t do much good — the woodwork of the windows and doors was so shattered by bombs that it let all the drafts in. We sat around sniffling, noses red and running, hands and feet numb with cold. When the cold inside the apartment became unbearable we would go out into the streets. After an hour of walking in sub-zero temperature the house seemed almost warm…for a while….

Owing to transportation difficulties foodstuffs were beginning once more to disappear from the market. No milk, no eggs, no meat, no vegetables. Very soon our diet was reduced to black bread, potatoes and cabbage. But we weren’t really hungry, just underfed.

This was not the end of New Year’s gifts. Not by a long shot. The Germans were at last moving to set up their new order. Every day fresh decrees and regulations were issued by the dozens….

Soap had been regimented, all the stocks of tea and coffee confiscated. One day George came back from school, his blue eyes black with hatred; they had been told to turn in all their Polish textbooks. He was already pretty mad because he was not allowed to wear his school cap of which he was so proud. And now the textbooks…

The order was issued that all objects of art and antiques in private hands be registered with the German authorities, presumably to be shipped for safekeeping to Germany. Art objects from art galleries and museums were already packed and loaded on big trucks. Then word went around that the University was also being plundered….

One afternoon the hateful rag published an order that sent financial panic throughout the city. All hundred and five-hundred zloty bills had to be presented within a week to the Devisenstelle to be registered and stamped. Unstamped bills would be considered unlawful after February 1. The short term made the registration of all bills in circulation technically impossible, and thousands of people who still had some money left found themselves ruined overnight.

Warsaw in those weeks looked like a huge, ruined anthill in which ants are desperately trying to rebuild some kind of shelter for themselves, while someone with a malicious stick systematically stabs at their efforts….