Objects

Fifteen tickets of the rationing coupons (i.e. to be returned together with the payment at the point of sale of the product), detached from the rest of the coupons - traces of tearing on the left, bottom and right edges. At the top, a straight edge and a margin strip indicating the top of the imprint on the page. Two illegible seals: purple, one fully visible, the other fragmentarily - ended at the torn off part. There is a third seal on the reverse side, a template to be fill in by hand - blank. The upper part of the printing indicates the period: 1945. Probably the Włodawers did not use the coupons before leaving for Poland and took them with them.

Provisioning issues keep on coming back in the memoirs of Paulina Włodawer. As a "very good" she considered a much earlier period than that of 1945 - around 1942, i.e. the time when the Orphanage in G'azalkent was operating: "I do not think that we, the employees, were paid a lot in money, but it did not matter much. What was important was what you got "in nature", and of course we got more than the unemployed. The rations were not regular, but from time to time Dad (always with someone else) drove a truck to Kymkent and brought (our area was not administratively subject to the nearby Tashkent, which was Uzbekistan, and we were administratively part of South Kazakhstan). We received flour, sugar, rice, semolina, egg powder, often even canned meat and fish. At that time we were definitely better off than the local population, and even than immigrants - evacuated from Voronezh or Rostov, who, while even having some money, could not buy much with it, during that difficult year 1942'' (MPOLIN-A4.1.1, entry of 28 April 1981).