Cigarettes as Currency

There was quite a few of the guards, all they were doing was trying to find different things that they wanted like some officers were selling their Sam Brownes for cartons of cigarettes. And everything went according to cigarettes. If you wanted to sell a bowl of rice depends on how many cigarettes were in camp. You’d get a package of cigarettes for a bowl of rice or you’d get one cigarette for a bowl of rice or two cigarettes for a bowl just depending on how many cigarettes are in camp. And then the price like a slice of bread or something like that would be worth a couple of cigarettes or on that basis like sometimes if a person was sick with dysentery or stuff on that principle then you didn’t feel like eating. And so somebody would go get your ration of bread or something on that principle and say okay, I’ll sell you a slice of bread and bring you your cigarettes, you know what the market is. And that’s what we used to do. I know I didn’t eat for a while there and I just told them to take my… take my slice of bread or my bowl of rice and so forth like that and get the cigarettes for it.