>>for 3 hours to buy 2 loaves of rationed bread.
Yep. OTOH...
The lovely, defiant, lady in the middle was my Great grandmother.
She was the daughter of a Volga-Russian/American blacksmith who got tired of the Bolsheviks and Czarists taking turns burning down the village, packed up his tools in a wheelbarrow... and his family onto a cattle-boat headed for the Statue of Liberty.
She remembered - and what she remembered, she taught.
Suffice it to say that being a defiant survivor is a family tradition.