We were both nine years old when the war ended. Not the Great War, the 'war to end all wars' of course, but the following one from 1939 to 1945. He was born in February of 1937 and I December 1936. We knew, of course, that something dreadful was happening in Europe even before 1945, when the war ended. There were rumours that circulated within the Jewish community, and there were dread confirmations.

Conversations meant to be mysteriously hidden from children, hushed when children were too curious and hesitated, waiting to hear more of whatever it was that made our parents' faces so grim and pale. Eventually, before the end of the war we knew some things, but certainly not all. We did know that Jews were somehow targeted. Of course even as children we were ourselves the targets in our school community of taunts and accusations of being a 'Christ-killer'. A puzzling charge we would bring home with us and ask our parents for an explanation.

So we certainly knew we were different. Different from most of the young people we went to school with. Different enough so that we sought each other out for companionship and comfort for there was much we shared. By age 14 we had become constant companions. Needless to say adolescence and the transition into early adulthood accompanied our relationship. When first I saw him I thought to myself that he was exactly the candidate I had been yearning for to be my best friend. I wasn't mistaken.

We both loved the out-of-doors, parks and forested areas, and would spend time together in nearby green spaces just being together, talking about things that young people find interesting. We seldom spoke of the war and that so many Jews had been sacrificed on the unappeasable alter of anti-Semitism. But it was always there. It shaped us in so many ways. How could it not, growing up in the shadow of the mass extermination of those who shared our ethnic identity, our universal culture, if not our religious belief, for we had none.

Believing in an almighty god just did not, to us, seem compatible with the horrendous, deliberate campaign to murder six million children, men and women of all ages that had been so hugely successful in its goal. No one in power who might have exerted influence and compassion to launch a campaign and rescue -- aside from the efforts of Jewish communities themselves, fairly helpless in their own vulnerability - stepped forward. Official Canada was supremely disinterested in absorbing any more Jews.

The MS St.Louis which set out from Hamburg on a mission to resettle its cargo of Jewish families when it appeared Cuba would take them, then refused, followed by Canada, the United States and others, an obvious example. Even the German captain's conscience was stricken at the plight of his passengers, hoping they might find haven. The world wasn't interested.

And then the war was over, news seeped out about the liberation of the death camps and the living souls more dead than alive who were taken to refugee camps to await their future. Surviving Jews, nostalgic for their homes returned to places in Europe where they had been transferred from to work- and death-camps, found themselves shunned, their property confiscated by their neighbours who threatened to finish what Nazi Germany had left undone. Suddenly, however, the world's conscience was stricken and countries that had formerly refused Jewish refugees found place for them, after all. Displaced persons began arriving in Canada, survivors of the unspeakable Holocaust.

He and I forged our life together, and married when we were 18. Long before that we found our entertainment alongside other  young people, attending dances, joining social clubs. He played football in high school, I played a trumpet, badly, in my school's band. The public library was a frequent destination for us, just as going to green spaces was. Once, I looked in the index of a library branch on Bloor Street that we frequented, and I saw the classification "Jews". The bald word struck me and I gagged. Why not, I said to him, "The Jewish People"? What dignity and respect was manifested to use an identifier that was so often hurled at us as a damning pejorative?

I recall running out of the library, he in close pursuit, begging me to stop, and when I did, I threw up on the sidewalk, my heart palpitating, weeping, as he held me close. He's never stopped holding me close.