On the Chocolate Trail

Best selling author Kate Simon’s memoir, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, speaks to the potency of wartime chocolate. Her father preceded the family to America and she records her fantasies about his life in America and her reunion with him there. From grim World War I, Warsaw, Poland, chocolate occupied her young mind as she transported herself out of her deprivation, “as wartime supplies of food diminished to coarse bread and potatoes, my life was filled with images of raisins and chocolate … all waiting for me in a big box called America, which would be mine soon, very soon.” When she, her baby brother and her mother, finally arrived at Ellis Island in 1916, their father met them. Anticipating a long wait as they were processed through immigration, her father sustained himself with a couple of Hershey bars. She recalls that when he finally picked her up in his arms to kiss her, “I tasted the chocolate and announced to my mother, ‘Our father has a sweet mouth.’”

Chocolate smoothed and soothed other refugee and immigrant passages. Overall the story of chocolate 35 years later during World War II spans from deprivation to comfort, from degradation to rescue, from despicable to artful. European Jewish businesses, including a number of Jewish chocolate enterprises in Europe, shut down during the Nazi period. The Nestle Company’s chocolate subsidiary Maggi employed thousands of war prisoners and Jewish slave laborers in its factory in Germany near the Swiss border. For many years it refused to open its Nazi era records. Nazis used chocolate bars to lure Jews onto cattle car trains to concentration camps. German saboteurs designed an exploding chocolate covered thin steel bomb intended to blow up seven seconds after someone broke off a piece.

Nazi Chocolate Bomb

Chocolate companies accommodated war’s restricted food supplies and the severe rationing of the period by modifying their products. While chocolate businesses and civilians alike were chocolate deprived during the war, the United States military sought to include chocolate in military rations. To satisfy these government orders for chocolate in wartime, companies helped each other out. Chocolate was put to several uses for the varying war efforts.

At the same time, to survive, some Jews used their chocolate skills to advantage and for survival.

Learn more in the forthcoming book: Jews on the Chocolate Trail: Stories of Jews and Cacao to be published by Jewish Lights in 2012.