Mother of 1940

This sculpture by the well-known sculptor Nikolaos Georgantis (1883-1947), titled "The Mother of the '40s" is a devastating depiction of the pain of loss as a consequence of the humanitarian crisis caused by war in a shocking way. 
In the winter of 1941-1942 hundreds of thousands of Greeks died in Athens and major urban centers of Greece from the great famine, caused by the combination of the confiscation of all available vital commodities, industrial and agricultural products by the occupying forces, the destruction of the infrastructure, and the imposition of a naval blockade by England. The situation was exacerbated by the particularly cold winter of 1941-1942, one of the worst in 60 years.  
Konstantinos Faltaits, who was one of the millions of Greeks impoverished by hunger and deprivation, described in his text entitled "Plea to the Sun" (1944), in all its tragedy and brutality, the situation in Athens in the winter of 1941-1942– the queues that formed outside bakeries that could not produce bread, the queues that formed for a bowl of nettle soup, the rotten barley that killed so many people, the children looking for food in the garbage and the mass deaths that after a while ceased to cause any horror or sympathy to passers-by.