Seventy-eight years ago today, just before the church bells tolled 1pm, around 75 enemy aircraft headed to Luqa.

Nine of them detached from the formation and bombed the area. The centre of the village was devastated. 

Carmen Zarb, nine, was scooped up with 32 other corpses and taken to the morgue. 

She had lost consciousness when buried alive in a World War Two air-raid shelter where 23 died, including her cousin and uncle.

As soon as she came to her senses and saw the bodies strewn on the floor around her, she started screaming.

Now, aged 87, the mother-of-three recounts the ordeal in a video by Infrastructure Malta, as part of its weekly online programme called It-Triq Tagħna, Barra 'l-Persjana (Out-takes), produced by Daniel Chircop and Chrysander Agius.

On that day, little Carmen had gone to her aunt’s house with a coffee grinder.

When the alarm was sounded, the two rushed to the shelter as her aunt feared that “trouble was brewing”.

In Luqa, a large part of the parish church of St Andrew collapsed and another bomb pierced the Mosta dome, fell into the church during Mass but failed to explode.

April 1942 was the worst month in the Siege of Malta, bringing unprecedented death and destruction to the island and robbing it of some important historic buildings.   

Enemy planes flew some 9,500 sorties over the island and 282 air raid alerts were crammed into the month. Over 6,000 tons of bombs were dropped which left 11,450 buildings destroyed or damaged.

Read more about it here.

You can watch the full episode, produced by Danusan, here.