My husband and I have lived our lives in the harrowing shadow of the Holocaust, it is never far from our minds. So we don't necessarily seek out films depicting any reference to those horrors. We don't need reminders, we have never 'forgotten'. Last night, however, we decided to watch a film documenting the struggle of an Austrian-born Jewish woman to recover her family's wealth in paintings, specifically paintings owned by her family, by Gustav Klimt whose famous painting of her aunt was among them, one treasured as a family heirloom, which the State of Austria treasured as a state heirloom of great renown, rejecting its Jewish provenance, presenting it as an anonymous subject. They renamed it from Portrait of Adele to Woman in Gold. And Helen Mirren, through her acting skills portrayed Austrian-American Maria Altmann movingly.

Gustave Klimpt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

I had read so much as a child and young woman revealing the extent of Nazi-led atrocities against the Jews of Europe leading to the ultimate plan to achieve the mass extermination of an ethnic group of peoples whom German fascism under Adolf Hitler considered not merely unter-mensch, but a pestilence. I hardly needed reminders. Still, it was an additional jolt.

The proud, nationalist country that gave the United Nations its grave and honourable demeanour under Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's nine-year authority, and which rallied around him in grand defiance when it was revealed that he had been a medalled and commended part of the military intelligence of Nazi Germany whose signature appeared on documents linked to massacres and deportations did all in its power to retain in its possession iconic art treasures looted from Jews.

That viewing brought back memories of my own, aside from my growing horror as a child reading about the persecution of Jews going back into ancient history, to discover that modern history outmanoeuvred the primitive pogroms to morph into a state-sponsored, detailed and mechanized efficient killing-machine dedicated to genocide.

Back in 1957 when I was 20 and working at a large accounting firm Deloitte, Plender, Haskins & Sells in downtown Toronto there was a young German woman about my own age also working there. For some reason I had invited her and her husband over for dinner one evening. There we were, all four pleasantly seated at the dinner table in the first house my husband and I owned, chatting about various things when the conversation turned to people we didn't like in our workplace. The lanky young husband smiled and with his accented German said something to the effect that it was too bad Germany hadn't targeted such people instead of the Jews. A stifling cloak of silence fell over us. I was aghast and repelled that I had invited someone of that ilk into our home.

Many years later when our firstborn was 17, a young woman approached me in a downtown shopping mall, asking if I knew where she could buy yogourt, in an accented German, a vulnerable-looking woman-child. I responded and somehow gained the knowledge that she was backpacking her way across Canada, and had been sleeping in an abandoned building on an island with a bridge approach nearby. We went with her to her sleeping place, gathered her belongings and took her home with us where she showed me the knife she carried with her, showered, washed her clothing, and slept over a few days. She asked my husband to drive her to the highway leading to Montreal, her next destination. We gave her a few dollars to tide her a bit, hugged her and waved her off.

Later still, canoe-camping for a week at Killarney provincial park with our youngest son we were hiking up a steep hill on a day-trip when my husband and I begged off going any further, leaving it to our son to continue to mount to the summit while we sat awaiting his return. It was a lengthy wait and eventually a young couple hove into view undertaking the same ascent. They were pleasant, eager to talk, and German. German youth are adventurous.

When we lived in Tokyo and became members of Friends of the Earth hiking club there were a number of young Germans who were also members of that club, and we fraternized with them during our week-end adventures when the group would take buses, trains, subways in a long succession of trips to gain the outer edges of the city and on into small towns adjacent mountain hikes. One young man in particular often chose our company; he hoped my husband could help him obtain a visa to Canada.

One end-of-summer adventure that took us to northern British Columbia with our youngest son, to the Kariboo Mountain range where at the 3,000-foot level the Bowron Lakes canoe-camping circuit beckoned, saw us introduced yet again to a young, adventurous couple whom we twice shared a camping spot with. This pair was Austrian. And they revealed to us their fear resulting from the presence on the circuit of a pair of Germans. It was the Germans, they declared, who were responsible for the Second World War and its excessive atrocities; Austrians were completely innocent.