We are welcome to argue about many issues, but that the most catastrophic event ever to hit Malta since recorded history was World War II should be beyond debate. World War I had only grazed Malta marginally, leaving minor casualties, but, overall, its financial impact on the island had almost been benevolent. The boom of far-away frontline battlegrounds translated in Malta into a boom for a drowsy economy. Your death was my wealth.
Nothing resembling this happened during World War II. Malta suffered what is claimed to be the highest concentration of exploding cordite per square mile, more than anywhere else in the whole world. The siege proved generous with famines, losses, destruction, bereavements, epidemics, all the biblical curses struggling for primacy.
The war did not discriminate – there was enough pain for everyone, lest anyone complain of being left behind.
But, despite everything, life limped on, for the many who counted daily survival a miracle; as for the few, those vampires who saw in the misery of others once-in-a-lifetime occasions to plump their wallets. Free markets withered in the same proportion that black markets flourished. People learned to live embraced by a lingering, suffocating fear, some sparse on heroism, many profuse on stoicism.
From my collections of old postcards and photos, I have selected a number of visual testimonials to the widespread material devastation inflicted by the ruthless Fascist and Nazi war machine.
The choice proved anything but easy. An eloquent and haunting set of war postcards, not credited to any publisher but almost certainly by the gifted photographer Alfred Vella Gera, accounts for several of them.
Differently from other subjects I tried to tackle earlier, the problem I encountered was not what to include but what to omit.
Source: Times of Malta https://timesofmalta.com/article/pictures-world-war-ii-devastated-malta.996204
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