The Dutch Hunger Winter is an unfortunate human tragedy which lasted
from the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945. It was a bitterly
cold period in Western Europe, creating further hardship on a continent that
had been devastated by four years of brutal war. Nowhere was this worse than in
the western Netherlands, which at this stage was still under German control. A
German blockade and a very cold winter resulted in a catastrophic drop in the
availability of food to the Dutch population. At one point the population was
trying to survive on only about 30 percent of the normal daily calorie intake.
People ate grass and tulip bulbs, and burned every scrap of furniture they
could get their hands on, in a desperate effort to stay alive. More than 20,000
people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945.
Even though this event is very tragic, it provided the psychologists
with an opportunity to carry out a variety of different case studies on the
victims of the Dutch Hunger Winter. An unfortunate event as such would be hard
and unethical to initiate by the psychologists’ own will, so as the Dutch
Hunger Winter occurred naturally, the psychologists could freely observe its
outcomes.
One of the most interesting case studies that they carried out was
the case study on the babies who were in the womb during the period of famine
in Netherlands. The findings were that the malnutrition and stress of women who
were pregnant during the Dutch Hunger Winter had an impact on their fetuses. The
babies who were disposed to stress during their time in womb due to lack of
nutrition suffer for their rest of lives. According to researcher Dr. Tessa
Roseboom of the University of Amsterdam, these people still bear “the stress of
war.” They are more at risk for cardiovascular disease, “more responsive to
stress,” and in poorer health generally than those born before the war and
those born after. She goes on to say that stress hormones in the mothers’ blood
triggered a change in the developing nervous systems of the fetuses as they
struggled with starvation. Early stress also affects the capacity to learn, to
respond to stress adaptively rather than maladaptively, how readily you fall
into depression, how vulnerable you are to psychiatric disorders, yet another
realm in which early experience and early stress can leave a very bad
footprint.
Therefore, an exposal to stress in the early stages of development
of babies can have a radical impact on their lives. These babies are more
likely to experience stress more often which also causes that they are more
vulnerable to cardiovascular diseases and a weak immune system.
