But my wife's family definitely knew what it meant to start anew from nothing. Everything they had except the four walls of the house they lived in was gone, including the ability to feed themselves. Her mom's family was on the verge of starving, but her dad's family were farmers, and they were able to grow some food and help the family of his new girlfriend (later his wife) survive. He couldn't help much, since he had a leg blown off by an artillery shell at age 18 in the war, but his family could, and he took some courses and went to work for a local bank helping out recovering farmers with loans. Their gratitude was shown at his funeral when four hundred locals came to pay their respects, and show their gratitude for his help when it really counted. My wife's mom found his honest nature more important than his being minus a leg--luckily for me!!
My family, by then all concentrated in the New York area, never experienced that kind of desperation during the war or after it, although my mom's dad was at rock bottom during the Great Depression, earning nickels and dimes by accompanying other people's children to school along with his own daughters. He never lost his wit, which got him a job with a Madison Avenue advertising agency, but that was much later in life. He was the who paraphrased LBJ, wanting to start a "War on Puberty to combat the Copulation Explosion."
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