I was nine years old when the Second World War ended. I was very well aware that a great evil had concluded. Well before the end of the war I had overheard my parents and their friends talking in sometimes-hushed tones about dreadful atrocities. I had a vague idea that people like me living in Europe were being systematically faced with extermination. The extent of that knowledge for a child is difficult to assimilate. But I know a dark cloud of apprehension and fear clouded my deeply inner consciousness.

From that day forward I read books about the Holocaust that left nothing whatever to the imagination. The extent of the crimes were so beyond belief, and yet there was ample proof that nothing capable of stirring disbelief in one's thoughts was beyond reality. All the days of my life the Holocaust has haunted my conscious self. To say that this horrendous event shaped the way I think, my opinion of humankind and my system of values, would be an understatement.

I remember too how incredulous I felt at the news that Winston Churchill's post-war stay as Britain's prime minister was challenged by the very political party he represented. I recall how I felt when news came that Josef Stalin was dead; a strange satisfaction that he was no longer alive to continue to wield the malevolent ideological power that had resulted in the deaths of millions he considered disposable. Adolf Hitler's death meant little to me; Nazi Germany had been defeated, and nothing could return the six million Jews his Aryan-purity-obsessed, anti-Semitic whirlwind had made lifeless, depriving the world and humanity of its belief in the goodness of the human race.

There was Pol Pot and Cambodian massacres, Rwanda and Bosnia, and Sudan's Darfurian maelstrom of death-dealing. More latterly, the collapse of civilization and resulting mass murders in Syria. But nothing stirred the fear and dread in me to compare with the incredulity I was assailed with one morning when my husband and I were preparing our granddaughter for school, and a breathless announcer spoke of a plane hitting the World Trade Center in New York. We turned on the television news and there, in living colour was the event that would twist the world into a long, agonizing battle with another fiercely death-dealing adversary.