(I'm German, in case that matters).
Looking at contemporary Poland, one would hardly believe that the country was a heap of ruins and dead bodies mere three generations ago.
They literally built everything after the war and transformed Poland in a country where no one was jobless or homeless a decade after ww2.
Socialism was a godsend (socially and economically) in after-war Poland and so was getting rid of it 4 decades later and later joining the EU.
Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.
We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.
You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.
Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.
But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.
Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.