My father, Bela Lowinger, came to Malta in March 1939. At that time he was well known in Budapest as a champion Greco-Roman wrestler and champion cross-country skier. He was also a Jew and head of his trade union.
On both these counts he was wanted by the Nazis (when we had contact again with his family in 1945 my father heard that every member of his extended family bar two had been gassed in Auschwitz between April and May 1944. The two left alive were the wife and one daughter of one of his brothers).
My mother and I joined him here in December 1939. War had already started, the period called the phoney war. Yugoslavia was still open and we were able to come through there and reach Italy via Trieste.
I remember the early morning we arrived by ferry from Naples, sun shining on the sea and a dghajsa rowing my father towards us. We lived for a while in a small flat in Tignè Street, Sliema, and had fresh milk deliveries regularly from the goat herdsman who called and milked the goats there and then on your doorstep. We were not interned when Italy came into the war, but that is another story.
In the autumn we moved to Main Street, Rabat, where daddy had a small shop and we lived at the back of the house and upstairs. It was still there in 1975 when I visited, and the very elderly Nanna remembered the Ungerizi who were there in the war.
I began going to St Dorothy's as a day girl but became a boarder in December 1940 just before my fifth birthday. My parents were very concerned at the way the war was going, they knew that if the Germans overran Malta they would both die, so they arranged with Mother Depiro, the then headmistress, that I should live in the convent and in the worst eventuality she would hide me and try to save me (I verified this with Mother Depiro herself as after 1994 I visited her now and again in Mdina).
I remember the years in the convent as being extremely happy. The nuns became my family, I got on very well with all the girls and have maintained tenuous ties with some of them uup to today. We attended daily Mass and studied a great deal.
Recreation was spent usually sitting in the back garden, sometimes playing beads (trying to flick beads into a small hole in the ground); sometimes we ran around a little; and I remember the Sunday afternoon walks we had round Mdina, out along the main gate and drawbridge, round the garden and then back again in time for vespers in the Cathedral.
We also heard sung Mass on Sundays in the Cathedral. We did a great deal of embroidery and I still have some of the pieces I made. I recall that during the worst of the bombing we actually went down into the Catacombs, did lessons there and I think slept there once or twice (my brother was born during this time too, May 1942, in the house in Rabat, in the middle of the biggest raid).
Sometime in 1943 I started agitating to become a Catholic, but Archbishop Michael Gonzi would not hear of it as in his opinion I was too young to make such a decision for myself, but I persevered and finally he agreed to see me. I went with Mother Depiro and was examined by him.
Finally he gave his permission as long as one adult member of the family became a Catholic too. So, in March 1944, my mother, brother and I were received into the Church in the convent chapel. I still have the beautiful holy picture given me by the nuns, hand painted and on the inside inscribed with the name of all the girls in the school at that time.
I was I think one of the naughtiest girls in the school, closely followed by Antoinette Cuschieri, and I was always in trouble, particularly with Mother Formosa, who was my dormitory mistress. Years later I visited when she was already very ill, and apologised to her because "I was always extra naughty with you". She said that I had not been naughty, just full of life and led others on, and she confessed "she had always been extra strict with me". We fell into each other's arms laughing.
Just after the war ended Mother Depiro wrote and produced a play called Melita in which I played the leading role. When I went back to visit in 1975, I had to wait in the parlour for a few minutes and there on the coffee table were two photo albums full of the pictures of the play.
My husband was amazed and particularly when Sorella Marchiggiani came bounding down the marble staircase calling out: "La piccola Alice, la piccola Alice". Incidentally, we also wore a deep blue winter dress but with a beautiful hand-made lace collar. I remember Sorella Marcheggiani, the portress, sitting at the door day in and day out making these collars. She also made lovely fine bobbin lace. For our baptism she gave my mother a black wood rosary in a little hand-made case which I still have.
My mother took me to England in August 1949; school there was a misery in comparison. In 1950, I was one in the party of some of the girls from the school in England, and we met a group from St Dorothy's in Rome for the Holy Year. We all stayed in the mother house in Strada Santa Onofrio. I remember sitting on the roof with some of the girls eating cherries and spitting stones at the youths walking by, and the visit was also memorable because I had my bottom pinched on the bus. I have a photo of the whole group and also one of Rosanne Axisa talking to the Pope.
As a postscript: I returned to live in Malta in 1994, after the death of my father, and was contracted by the Russian Centre for Culture to give some Lieder recitals. I invited Mother Depiro to come to my recital in December 1995, and she came with Sister Celia. When the concert was over, I introduced Mother Depiro to the audience as the person who exactly 55 years before had started me off with piano lessons. Mother Depiro played two verses of a Magnificat she had written in the 1930s and received a bigger ovation than I did! It was a very moving occasion.
The nuns at the convent gave me those things which have had a lasting effect on my life: they introduced me to the Faith which is my rock; they taught me self-discipline; they instilled in me a love of study and of silence. Whatever I am today is based on their unselfish, loving devotion to the girls in their care.