Australian comedian retraces Maltese past in hit TV series

Australian comedian Shaun Micallef's great fear upon embarking on Who Do You Think You Are?'s invitation to retrace his Maltese roots was that it would reveal very dull people.

The Australian press has now been saturated with what turned out to be the flipside to Micallef's low expectations: the famous broadcaster, comedian and author - not known to the Maltese TV audience - learns of his great, great, great grandfather Patrick in a former Turkish war hospital, his brush with Florence Nightingale and his involvement in the Crimean War.

Then he heads to Malta, for the first time in his 49-year existence, where he visits his father's childhood home in Gzira, uncovers the painful childhood of his father in World War II, and finds out his great-grandfather died in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 on the HMS Black Prince.

It's a great story. Because on his return home, Micallef rejoins his father Fred - whose silence on his childhood in wartime shelters was never discussed at home - in opening up about his past. "If I'd ever wondered why he wasn't particularly chatty about his own childhood and his father's life it certainly explained why, because his father was very similar," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "I understand why he would have been a bit reticent to talk about what had happened because it was all very sad."

Micallef's story was a hit for SBS when it aired last week. The comments of so many Maltese migrants on the comments-board of the SBS website are a testament to the emotiveness the Second World War elicits in so many emigrant families.

But for 72-year-old Doris Mifsud, his story hit home in the most unexpected of ways.

When Micallef visits his father's childhood home on Patrick Stuart street, in Gzira, next-door neighbour Lydia Camilleri is the only person on the street who remembers his grandmother Rosina. They bonded during the war, both their dads fighting overseas in the British forces. The intensity of the German bombing campaign left an indelible mark on the young minds of children and teenagers waking up to the sounds of the sirens and being rushed to the nearest underground shelter.

On her rooftop, Lydia points towards a row of houses that were obliterated in a horrific New Year's Eve raid in 1942. One of the stories handed down to Shaun Micallef is when his father emerged from the shelter during an incessant round of German raids, to find a good part of the street's houses had been reduced to rubble.

As Lydia recounted the story to Micallef, her distinct reference to the death of a pregnant mother and the survivor - a three-year-old child saved from beneath the rubble of the houses - was being seen on TV by none other than Doris Mifsud herself in Melbourne.

Her pregnant mother Mary, whom Lydia mentions in her story to Micallef, died with her father who was home on leave from the army. Her sister was with an aunt that night - not in Patrick Stuart street - surviving the bombing. Doris was just three years old, one of the few survivors from the raid, when someone heard her crying and pulled her out of the rubble. A priest tried to save the baby inside her mother's womb by cutting the dead woman's stomach: the infant lived for just an hour.

Writing on the SBS comments board soon after the programme aired, Mifsud said that when she heard Lydia talking about a pregnant woman and the priest trying to save the baby, "I said 'God, that is my mother... my family had told me about it, but to hear it from someone who was there made it a reality."

"Growing up, my mother Doris heard the story Lydia recounted," Mifsud's daughter Monica told the SBS producers. "That her mum was pregnant, and after she was found dead a priest tried to save the baby by cutting him out of the womb. Apparently he survived less than an hour."

Both Doris and Rosie were placed in an orphanage after the NYE bombing, but at the age of 12 they emigrated to Australia with their grandmother, and both have lived long and happy lives there. Doris had seven children and many grandchildren.

"She watched the programme with us and she was incredibly moved. It's indescribable how much it meant to her that someone remembered her mother and the story. It was though it was made real," Monica said.