The Dutch Hunger Winter

In the final years of World War II, as the Netherlands awaited liberation, one of the most devastating and unexpected famines in modern European history unfolded. In September 1944, Dutch railway workers launched a strike in an effort to cripple Nazi troop movements and aid the advancing Allied forces. The Nazis responded with brutal efficiency: they cut off food supplies to the western Netherlands, plunging the region into what became known as the Dutch Hunger Winter. By the time the country was liberated in May 1945, over 20,000 civilians had died of starvation, and the effects of that winter would ripple through time in ways no one could have anticipated.

What made the Dutch Hunger Winter unique wasn’t just the cruelty or suddenness of the famine... it was how contained and well-documented it was. The sharp beginning and end allowed researchers to treat it, grimly, as a natural experiment in human development and health. Among the most affected were pregnant women and their unborn children. The scarcity of food during critical months of gestation left permanent marks, not just in memory or behavior, but at the genetic level.

Dr. Bas Heijmans, a geneticist at Leiden University Medical Center, and his colleagues have spent years unraveling how this trauma became biologically embedded. Their research suggests that famine silenced certain genes in unborn children... specifically through a process known as epigenetics. Unlike DNA mutations, epigenetic changes don’t alter the genetic code itself but change how genes are expressed. One such change involves the addition of methyl groups to DNA strands, which can effectively “turn off” genes. In children born to malnourished mothers during the Hunger Winter, researchers found the PIM3 genelinked to metabolism... had been switched into a lower gear. This change persisted decades later, subtly shaping how their bodies processed energy.

This isn’t merely an interesting biological footnote. It forces a profound question: How deeply does suffering embed itself in the human story? How far does the reach of injustice, exploitation, and catastrophe truly extend?

The same question echoes through modern economic systems, where pain, destruction, and inequality are not only side effects—they are often built-in features. Just as famine in 1945 etched itself into unborn children, the machinery of modern capitalism programs dysfunction into the lives of the living. Consider the U.S. prison system: with over two million people behind bars... many in private prisons traded on Wall Street... justice has been reduced to profit. Guilt or innocence becomes irrelevant in a system where incarceration fuels a financial engine, exploiting the poor for commercial gain. This isn't a glitch in the matrix. It's a design.

The pattern repeats elsewhere: planned obsolescence in consumer goods ensures that nothing lasts... by intent. Electronics, cars, even household appliances are deliberately manufactured to fail or become outdated, pushing consumers into a perpetual loop of wasteful replacement. A sustainable product is not economically viable because sustainability is the enemy of growth in a system where profit is the sole god. This ethos infects every sector, including healthcare. As cold as it sounds, the pharmaceutical industry thrives not by curing diseases like cancer, but by managing them indefinitely. A cured patient is a lost customer. In this inverted moral economy, healing is unprofitable.

And it doesn’t stop with domestic systems. Crime, terrorism, and war (real and manufactured) feed the GDP. The military-industrial complex in America produces weapons of unimaginable destruction, drops them across the globe, and then awards contracts to rebuild the very nations it helped destroy. Violence becomes revenue. Chaos becomes commodity. Despair is engineered to be profitable.

But there is an even deeper layer (spiritual and metaphysical) that puts all of this into a broader, more disconcerting perspective. From this view, suffering isn’t only expected; it’s essential to the architecture of experience. Our souls, energetic and immortal, understand that pain is part of the curriculum. They don’t fear it. They grow through it. The earthly drama... with its cycles of war, injustice, and starvation... is not an accident, but a set stage. As Shakespeare famously wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

The roles we play... hero or villain, victim or savior, poor or powerful... shift over lifetimes. You may be the oppressed in this life, and the oppressor in the next. You may be the starving child in Syria today and the billionaire financier tomorrow. Even the most tragic and seemingly senseless experiences... like the death of a toddler in a war zone or a mother collapsing from hunger... are, in some higher dimensional framework, chapters in a longer, more complex story of spiritual evolution.

Even Hollywood reflects this existential complexity. In 2001, Denzel Washington won an Oscar for portraying a corrupt narcotics officer in Training Day, while Halle Berry received hers for playing a grief-stricken waitress in Monster’s Ball. Neither role was heroic in the traditional sense. Yet both characters embodied the harsh truths of struggle, trauma, and redemption in a world that often rewards spectacle over sincerity, and brokenness over beauty.

So what does the Dutch Hunger Winter tell us, beyond its haunting history? It shows us that trauma leaves a mark... biologically, socially, economically, and spiritually. That mark becomes a code, repeated across generations and institutions, unless we confront its root: a world designed to benefit from suffering. Whether in war, commerce, or policy, pain has been woven into the business model. But perhaps, in understanding that pattern, we can begin to unravel it.

We may be actors on this stage, but we are not bound to every script handed to us. We can rewrite scenes, change roles, or walk off the stage altogether. That, too, is encoded in us... not in the DNA of profit and punishment, but in the quiet voice of our higher selves. The same voice that survived the winter, that watches us even now, and whispers: You were made for more than this.