I grew up with an awareness that may have been unusual in a small child. Seared into my subconscious, everpresent in my thoughts now are the ghastly events and details of the Holocaust. It was an ongoing atrocity in my childhood, my ears picking up whispered conversations between my parents, my parents and their friends. As an aware child I read books about Jewish tribulations. Antisemitism is a word I wasn't aware of, but the very act itself was familiar to me. I dimly recall asking my father why I was called a Christ-killer and a dirty Jew. As I grew older, I ravenously read accounts of the Holocaust.

 

Fifty years ago when our children were young, just reaching their teen years, we happened to be in one of those indoor malls popular during that era, built underground as a kind of basement adjunct-enterprise to downtown buildings. There were wide-open spaces brilliantly lit, with no natural light, but which drew people in Ottawa's summer heat and brutal winters to shop at boutique-like specialty shops. While there, a young girl approached me and asked in heavily-accented English where she could buy yoghurt.

 

A brief conversation ensued, and she revealed that she was 17 years old, back-packing through Canada, a German citizen who had struck out on her own. During the years of Fascist Germany, the Fuhrer true to a socialist ideal, instilled healthy lifestyles in the population, which included encouraging young people to travel -- while his machinery butchered the untermensch. I must have asked where she was staying and her response stunned me. She was sleeping rough in an old abandoned building on a small island in the Ottawa River. We knew the site, had been there, and I was shocked. I said to her that was dangerous, to expose herself like that. She laughed and said she had a knife to protect herself.

 

We drove her back to the island where she retrieved her backpack and took her home with us. She showered, went out to the garden to dry her long blonde hair. I don't recall our children having any interest in her. She slept that night and for another few nights on a sofa in our basement recreation room that I'd covered with bedding. She shared our meals. And she said she was ready to move on. We gave her $20 which she didn't want to take, and drove her to a busy intersection where she intended to hitchhike a drive to Montreal. We wished her well, and to be safe.

 

A month or so later the telephone rang and at the other end a cheerful voice said when my husband answered: "Here is Iris!". She told him where she was, identifying the street on her return to Ottawa and Irving picked her up, brought her back for another few days' stay. And then she left again with another $20, to continue her journeys. A year later a surprise arrived in the mail, a postcard covered with a message from Iris who had returned to her home country.  

My bedside reading material now is an account of an American couple from Philadelphia who decided in the late 1930s to try to negotiate America's complex and restrictive immigration system with its strict quotas, particularly for Jews, and particularly for Jews desperately attempting to escape Germany and Austria. It's likely that the narrative in the book prompted me to dredge up that old memory of the young girl exploring Canada.

And while I was writing this, I recalled another incident, about 30 years ago when we had gone canoe-camping with our younger son, a biologist, to a nature preserve in Quebec; we had taken a day-trip from our camp and began climbing a modest enough mountain, but Irving and I were too bushed to climb to the summit and our son forged on as we waited half-way up the mountain. While we waited, a pair of climbers passed us, stopping to chat briefly; a young couple from Germany.

On another occasion years later, when we spent a week canoe-camping as we did the Bowron Lakes circuit in British Columbia with our son, halfway through the circuit we had difficulty finding a camping spot that hadn't already been taken by others. Finally, exhausted and late afternoon, we could stop paddling; we found a camping area that hadn't already been claimed. Soon after we put up our tent another canoe came by; the two sitting in the canoe looked as tired as we had been and called up to us if we would mind sharing the spot with them. We welcomed them in, offered them a cup of hot tea. They were a young couple from Austria, tourists. And they mentioned how alarmed they felt when they saw German tourists among the many people also engaged in the Bowron Lakes route. That really struck us.

In the here-and-now, another beautiful day, lots of sun, and the high winds of the last few days subdued. We went out this afternoon for our ravine hike through the same icy trails we had encountered yesterday and for which my moderately-spiked cleats strapped over my boots had proved inadequate. Today I took the precaution of pulling on serious crampons and they made all the difference, enabling me to proceed uphill and down with confidence. Sensibly, Irving had worn his heavier cleats both days.