Every day, an average of 50,000 people left on hunger journeys from the big cities to the country with carts or on bicycles. Mainly women went to get food, because men were at risk of being rounded up by the Germans. Whoever managed to buy or exchange food for valuables still risked the confiscation of the food when returning to the city. People lived off sugar beets and tulip bulbs. Whoever had people in hiding had even bigger problems. Illegal groups tried to arrange food. The National Organisation for Assistance to People in Hiding received so much help in the provinces of North-Holland and Friesland that in early 1945 the organisation took upon itself to supply food for all the illegal activities. Hundreds of thousands of city residents in the west were affected by the hunger. An estimate of 22,000 people died from starvation.