It was 1943. Singapore, reeling under the Japanese Occupation, was a ravenous place. “We all were thin, skinny, sickly,” remembered Ismail bin Zain. “Very hard life…Better to die than to live. Another year…if the Japanese were here, I think a lot of people would have died from malnutrition,” he told the National Archives of Singapore’s Oral History department in an interview in 1985.

Another survivor, Frank Tay, was just 10 years old when the Occupation began in 1942. As it wore on, rice and flour became so scarce that his stepmother used ragi to make pancakes. Indeed, in all its recorded history, Singapore has never been hungrier than during those terrible years. With the Japanese seizing extant food stocks for their military, and supply lines from Europe disrupted, many suffered from severe food deprivation. Malnutrition related diseases like beri-beri, rickets and scurvy spread, leading to a spike in deaths. Tay recalled being “perpetually hungry” and on a “starvation diet”. Interviewed in 2010, he spoke of the disbelief these wartime stories elicited from his grandchildren.

“Did you really feel that hungry?!”