Today marks the 75th Anniversary of VE-Day, Victory in Europe Day. The Second World War remains for Malta, and all countries in Europe, one of the defining events of the last century. Over 15,000 Maltese who survived that conflict are still alive today.

On May 8, 1945, the western world erupted in celebration at the end of a bloody war that cost millions of lives across every corner of the planet. Just over a week earlier, Hitler had shot himself in his bunker in Berlin. The German act of military surrender was signed in Rheims in France on May 7 and, at the insistence of the Russian leader, Joseph Stalin, in Berlin the day after.

Although Malta’s pivotal frontline involvement in the conflict had ceased with the surrender of Italy two years earlier, it emerged with relief at last from the lockdown it had endured during six long years of war.

By then, the epic of Malta’s undefeated valour had been established in history, marked by the award of the George Cross to the people of the islands in April 1942, setting a historic seal on their courage.

Threatened with isolation and starvation, Maltese men, women and children had withstood the most savage aerial bombardments with gallantry and dogged determination – a record, in Churchill’s words, “of constancy and fortitude”. More than 1,500 civilians perished and countless were injured.

Peace was greeted with a mass sigh of exhausted relief. There was a deep hunger for a return to pre-war life, tinged with the realisation that the world had changed irrevocably.

Scenes of jubilation were repeated all over the victorious western world.

In part of his radio address to the world, George VI struck a sombre note: “Let us remember those who will not come back… let us remember the men in all the services who have laid down their lives. We have come to the end of our tribulation and they are not with us at the moment of our rejoicing.”

As crowds poured into Times Square in New York, President Truman paid tribute to his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died in office only a month earlier: “This is a solemn but glorious hour,” the new president said. “The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.”

In Malta and throughout the world, VE-Day was also shaded with sadness at the immense losses of lives sustained in the conflict and the uncertainties surrounding the future. The effects of the war would linger, in rationing, austerity and, in Europe, the wave of refugees fleeing Russian vengeance from the wreckage of the Third Reich.

Yet the speed at which post-war Germany was rebuilt and flourished may be a welcome reminder, in today’s age of COVID-19, of how swiftly human nature can regenerate after disaster.

As we recall and mark VE-Day, the battle against coronavirus may well come to rival that war for its historical significance and long-term impact on the way we live and think.

The coronavirus conflict will not end, like the Second World War, with some relieving moment of unconditional surrender. Luckily, the number of COVID-19 victims is nowhere in comparison. But still, it is testing Malta’s mettle in the face of adversity.

And the Maltese will greet CV-Day very much as they did VE-Day 75 years ago, with much relief.

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