Wind again, roaring through the landscape, whisking off and away whatever remained on the trees of yesterday's snowstorm. On the plus side, a wide, open blue sky and sun so dazzling it was almost blinding. As for the snow, there's plenty of it, perhaps no longer remaining on trees and shrubs, but fallen to the ground where it has been building up for months to a sizable snowpack.

The pair of neighbourhood cardinals were poised on the tall maple next door, a paeon of praise for the day lilting over the atmosphere. A host of small birds, looking like sparrows, flying like goldfinches, popped in, out and around the cedar hedge at the back of the fence in the backyard, and into the bare-branched mulberry beside the deck. The cardinals later took turns on the porch when the squirrels were finished, to take their turn at the peanuts strewn about.

When we left for the ravine this afternoon it was still windy, still sunny, and colder than it's been in a week. Reflecting the usual merry-go-round of weather conditions for the month of March. And tomorrow, just to inject a bit of incredulity (already!?) and gloom (circadian readjustment) we put our clocks forward an hour in honour of that ridiculous, no-reason habit of 'Spring forward, Fall Backward' when we change from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time.

A nuisance, and an environmental/social hazard best laid away in perpetuity in favour of simply remaining with Standard Time. Those in charge of decision-making on such issues fail to be persuaded by research amply demonstrating the futility of its necessity, as opposed to the societal disruption dangerous to human health the yearly ritual poses. But we'll adjust, we always do.

None of which changes one iota of the landscape itself, just the timing in which we interact with it. Sure enough, most of the snow had been whipped off the forest canopy between yesterday afternoon when we were last out, and this afternoon, with the effect of the wind and the milder temperature that prevailed, leading to snowmelt.

The forest still looked beautiful; remnants of the snow still clung to branches. The creek still ran wide and full, carrying along a winter's-worth of detritus falling from the trees overhanging the waterway on its banks. Banks which are none too permanent, given their Leda clay constituent. We took our time, ambling along the trails, Jackie and Jillie doing double-time and more in their back-and-forth exercises at control of the two hapless humans at the other ends of their leashes.

No close-up encounters with other dogs or people today. When we were high up on the ravine heights we could faintly hear the sound of a small dog's barking attracting the attention of our two who indignantly returned the canine comments to its originator. They sat poised on the brink of the prominence where the hill below descended deep into the valley, with another ridge on the opposite side, exchanging insults with the little fellow too far away to see, on another trail.

When we arrived back home after our outing, there was the usual bustling about by Jackie and Jillie, exuberant as usual, taking to roistering wildly around the house after one another to work off the energy they hadn't quite exhausted in the ravine. Once that was done, they haunted my husband to get into the kitchen, haul cauliflower out of the vegetable crisper and slice away sizeable florets for them to feast on, their favourite treat.

An all-day freezing rain throughout yesterday made it unattractive for us to go out to the ravine. Freezing rain at -3C is no picnic, and makes for miserable hiking conditions. So, we experienced one of those fairly rare days when outside activity was at an imposed minimum. When the freezing rain occasionally turned to ice pellets, Jackie and Jillie went out to the backyard for some frenetic running about, happy to be outside, but not prepared to stay out too long, just making the most of the situation.

Late last night the freezing rain gave way to wet snow, and very quickly the landscape took on an altogether different aura as everything that was frozen began to turn to white as the temperature rose to -1C. That doesn't seem to make sense, that at a colder temperature we'd get freezing rain and once the temperature moderated upward the rain would turn to snow, but this reflects not only peculiar weather, but the lay of the land in the Ottawa Valley.

And so, it snowed all night; every time I cocked an eye open through our otherwise-dark bedroom in a brief waking period, I'd see brightness out the window, a scintillating, sparkling light and I knew it was continuing to snow. By morning we'd accumulated several inches of snow and everything looked absolutely glorious. After breakfast our son, still with us for another few days before returning to his home in Vancouver, got his skiing gear together and made for the ravine.

He keeps a pair of skis, ski boots and poles here for those times that he stays over with us for a week here and there in the winter, so he can take advantage of the geology and the weather, as an avid skier. He's accustomed to different terrain, of course, accessing ski trails and backcountry skiing opportunities in the mountains around Vancouver.

By the time he returned, my husband has finished shovelling out our walkways, and it was still snowing heavily. Then off we went, all of us, our son on his skis, as we made our way into the ravine together. Jackie and Jillie are now accustomed to seeing him on skis and they behave well now, alongside him where years ago they would bark furiously at the unaccustomed sight of a person with long things strapped to their feet, coasting downhill,  yapping at his heels.

My eyes were captured by the forest deep in snow, every branch of every tree and shrub piled high with snow, boughs bent low over the forest floor with the weight of the snow. Jackie and Jillie were wearing their boots and rushed everywhere, flinging themselves into the joy of new snow, behaving very like children in fact, delighted with the atmosphere and the challenging adventure that lay before them. How one's perspective changes from one day to another!

Snow kept falling, at times heavily, as we made our way along the trails, up the hills, back down again over the crests and ridges and into valleys, and then repeating the process as we continued along through the forest. We saw several other people out with their dogs, and at one juncture came across a tall young girl out by herself walking serenely through this winter wonderland. Although she was walking alone she appeared not to want to be alone, keeping pace with me, and seemingly eager to talk.

And then she asked me to repeat the names of our two little dogs. After which she introduced her name to me, and it was a very familiar one: Jillie.

On Saturday evening we settled down to watch a German film titled "Labyrinth of Lies". The film is a period piece, taking place in Germany fifteen years after the Second World War. When the vanquished Germany of fascist Nazi aspirations was licking its wounds and carrying on with life. It was reaching toward normalcy, not quite spurning the recent past, but tucking it away in some obscure place in peoples' apprehensions, generally disinterested in disinterring any aspect of what had just recently passed.

And most particularly the Holocaust. It was not just denial, but indifference. Germany felt it had suffered and suffered enough, that any recollection of what they had no wish to recall, and felt they knew nothing of was unwelcome. Most Germans claimed never to have heard the placename Auschwitz much less be aware of what it signified as the most hideously-linked place in Poland where Germany felt it safe from public censure to get on with its plan to obliterate the presence of Jews throughout occupied Europe through a plan of physical erasure by any means proving successful.

The Final Solution employed many means of extinguishing the lives of Jews, young and old, but it discovered the most efficient in a combination of suffocating gas chambers and vast crematoria whose chimneys lofted to the heavens belched the minuscule blackened remains of millions of innocent children, women and men, infants and elderly alike. In the minds of most Germans it never happened. In the minds of German officials it was best to behave as though it never happened. No reckoning required, no inner search for the rationale that held the liberation of the world would be accomplished by obliterating the presence of an ethno-cultural-religious group whose members had been recognized as achieving great forward strides in advancing civilization, in artistic and scientific breakthroughs enriching humanity.

Had they been a group whose presence on Earth added nothing of significance to the greater good, their anguish and destruction would still have cried to the heavens for moral retribution.

The year 1958 saw a newly introduced staff member to the German federal court prosecution team, a young man whose idealism was groomed by his memory of a father who instructed his son to "always do the right thing". The father had never returned from the war front, and fifteen years on was presumed dead, but his memory remained precious and large in his son's mind, as someone who rejected the Third Reich, inspiring the son to take on a campaign to restore honour and dignity to a Germany he loved, and throughout the course of his passionate adventure in discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, discovering that no one was interested, everything chose to deny, and his course of action was doomed to fail because of governmental obstructionism.

His commitment to cleansing Germany of its immense moral blot against humanity spurred him to see justice done impartially in the recognition of the great crime committed against Europe's Jewish community. First-hand narrative accounts of the suffering and horrors witnessed by survivors left him shaken and appalled. The grief expressed by survivors burrowed deep into his own soul. Discovering that his venerated father was in fact a member of the Nazi Party, the chief prosecutor attempted to assuage his junior member's despair by assuring him that membership had been universal within the legal community. Just as the knowledge of the vicious oppression of the Jews was common knowledge among average Germans who claimed to have known nothing of what had occurred.

His commitment and determination against all odds, however, and the support he was given by his superior, the federal prosecutor general, who just happened to be a Jew who had been a wartime slave worker in Auschwich, saw Johann Radmaan, the young prosecutor, eventually prevail. His desperate search to apprehend the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, came to naught, but he had the satisfaction of seeing the Mossad capture Adolf Eichmann, and was outraged when Germany had no interest in requesting his extradition from Israel, to face public trial and the consequences due him.

His efforts did result in the arrest and prosecution and trial of relatively routine, minor members of the Nazi military, complicit in the extermination of their helpless Jewish victims.

France: From German Fascist Occupation to Islamofascist Occupation

July 1940: After the military ceremony yesterday, I went to services at the little synagogue, which was full to bursting. In the prayer for our country, "France" was substituted for the word "Republic". I encountered friends evacuated from Paris and Luneville ... French Jewry is enduring a particular kind of anguish. It accepts suffering along with everyone else but dreads the discrimination the enemy may demand. This fear makes me particularly dread the future, for myself and for my sons. But I still have confidence. France cannot accept just anything, and it is not for nothing that the bones of my family have mingled with its soil for more than a century -- and that I have served in two wars. For my wife, my sons, and myself, I cannot imagine life in another climate; pulling up these roots would be worse than an amputation.

February 1941: I've been told that on the day the Statut des Juifs was published the government spokesman, who receives the foreign press every day at the evacuated' Quai d'Orsay in Vichy, answered a question from an American journalist by saying 'The Statut was neither demanded nor imposed on us by the occupying authorities. The government takes full responsibility for it. It was decided upon, after mature reflection, in response to the needs of the nation'. It was useful to identify this historical point, and we shall know enough not to forget it. It appears that this comment, when received in New York, was considered sufficient cause for demonstrations and protest meetings. Poor France!
Thus I have been led to wonder, what are the causes of such an iniquity, what are the deep reasons why an armistice regime would deny, in such a brutal fashion, a humane tradition going back more than a century; for a soldier to forget the innumerable sacrifices, for thinkers to forget [Henri] Bergson, and a whole galaxy of fine minds ... Since our calamity in June 1940, the Jews of France have had neither the leaders nor the defenders they deserve....
1. The moral influence of German propaganda, through imitation. Without admitting it, people are adopting the conquerors' methods without stooping so low as to accept any of their myths that are condemned by science.
2. The financial activities of the German propaganda services, which have succeeded in poisoning the minds of certain journalists, consciously or unconsciously, during the past eight years by resurrecting and distributing the pernicious works of Celine, Chateaubriand, the Gringoire campaigns [nationalist anti-Semitic journal], the 'Rothschild' and 'Mandel' slogans, etc.
3. The explicit demands of Action francaise, which for the past forty years has been calling for discrimination against Jews in France.
4. Certain facts that unfortunately have seemed to justify an apparently moderate racism: the actions of Leon Blum and the Popular Front, which were called Jewish; the presence of too many Jews in the press agencies, the film industry, banking, and behind the scenes politically, and, it must be said, their inborn exuberance; the too-hasty immigration of autocrats; the high percentage of Jewish names among citizens naturalized since 1918 [as a result of immigration from central Europe].
5. The inability of the French administration, despite all warnings received from those who were thinking clearly, to complete a Statut des Etrangers [Law on Foreigners] and to have an immigration policy...
To sum up, France has taken revenge on the Jews for the [French] blindness and inability to understand, since the more or less disguised closing of the United States to immigration from Europe, that France could profit from these human resources if it would manage and select them -- before assimilating them.

February 1942: 1. By the communication referred to above [Measures against the Jews], the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces in France asks that a certain number of measures be taken with regard to Jews in the Occupied Zone, such as: the obligation to wear a distinctive symbol, being banned from frequenting public places, excepting certain premises particularly reserved for them, and the institution of a special curfew.
2. I have the honor of informing you that I am not in agreement with these proposals.
3. I feel that the various strict measures already in force to date against the Jews are sufficient for the intended purpose, which is to remove them from public employment and from positions of authority in industry and commerce in this country.
4. There can be no question of going further without deeply offending French public opinion, which will see in these measures only humiliations without real efficacy, either for the future of the country or for the security of the occupying troops. The very excess of these decisions would certainly go against the intended purpose and would run the risk of provoking a movement in support of the Jews, who would be considered martyrs.

February 1943, Marseilles:  A quick report on what has happened -- just for myself, since I am not entitled to comment on it. On Friday, January 22, beginning in the early morning hours, there were massive raids and arrests all over Marseilles, to be expected due to the arrival during the preceding days of mobile guard units, coming by bus or train from Toulouse, Lyon, Nancy, and even from Paris. Reliable sources told us that a conference was held on the 21st at the railroad station to consider the use of eighteen trains prepared to leave for an unknown destination. We didn't know whether these were for [German] redeployments, or for sending off suspects arrested following the measures being planned.
Shortly before noon both the German and French police assigned to the railroad station began making arrests, entirely indiscriminately, and transporting the arrested persons by truck to the Surete and then to Baumettes Prison for identity checks. Jews were being arrested merely on sight of their stamped identity cards. In the evening the arrests continued, and there were also raids in certain neighbourhoods during the night. We tried urgently to speak with the police at their administrative offices but got no results. We were told that these were general measures being taken by the police, by agreement with the German authorities, toward the definitive cleansing of the city of Marseilles.
Diary of a Witness, 1940 - 1942 Raymond-Raoul Lambert

Rioters outside a Paris synagogue. Photo: Facebook. July 2014

An anti-Israel demonstration at the city’s Bastille Square quickly turned violent with protesters seeking out and attacking Jewish targets and screaming “death to the Jews” and “Hitler was right” according to community newspaper, JSS News.
Signs in support of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood were on display as well as a replica of a Palestinian rocket similar to those launched from Gaza at Israel in recent weeks, according to the report.
Hundreds of Parisian Jews were trapped in a synagogue while rioters threw stones and bricks. The group was initially thought to be held hostage and was freed to leave the center only after police intervention at 9 p.m. A Jewish owned store on rue de la Roquette was trashed by 50 men with iron bars and a young man was hospitalized nearby, according to reports. Another synagogue in Paris was also attacked and a source told The Algemeiner that a similar demonstration in Marseille also turned violent.
“What we are witnessing in Paris today is extremely, extremely serious. Jews are in peril for their lives,” New York-based French Jewish artist and activist Ron Agam told The Algemeiner.
Criticizing French police, Agam said, “French authorities acted like amateurs in failing to predict collateral violence against the Jewish community. I am outraged like I never have been against the Government for being so careless when they knew how radical this demonstration against Israel was going to be.”
“To see so many French people, most of them Muslims, calling for a pogrom against Jews and supporting a criminal and terrorist organization is the most troublesome situation,” he said, “French Jews are in serious danger.”
The Algemeiner -- July 2014