When I was entering my high school years, there was only one Jewish girl in the village school. She was a classmate. She died recently. I had no contact with her as an adult. I hold in memory the face of a girl who was always trying to be like all the other girls. She was a product of her time, daughter of an archetypical Jewish merchant whose facility with languages attracted first-generation European immigrants to his store. The first immigrants are gone from rural Saskatchewan. So are the multilingual Jewish merchants who were in almost every prairie village. So are most of the villages. So is the girl.
The picture I hold in memory is of a girl standing with all the other students on an outdoor basketball court, saluting the flag and pretending to join in a Christian hymn and a Christian prayer. We were praying to the Christian God to smite our country's enemies and to protect the young men of our village who had marched away to war. Then, it seemed the proper thing to do. It doesn't seem so now. Seventy years later, I think it would have been more merciful to forego the patriotic rites that reminded the girl every morning that she was the only one.
No doubt she knew something about the beginnings of the evil that we now call the Holocaust. No doubt she knew about Ottawa's rejection of fear-stricken Jews attempting to flee from Europe. The other pupils didn't and she never tried to tell us.
In 2011, I have no apology to make for my ignorance. I was a boy then. Boys don't decide to make war. Boys have neither the inclination nor the power to initiate programs of mass extermination. I have no place in the group that feels guilt for the Holocaust. I didn't do it.
There is still a feeling in lands identified as Christian that full atonement for the horror that befell European Jews has not been made - nor for the centuries of persecution that preceded it.
Atonement began in 1947 with the creation of the state of Israel. The United Nations, which includes Canada, made a new country out of land which had been occupied by Palestinians for almost 13 centuries. (The Biblical promised land endured for 700 years.) Were it not for the Biblical story of the conquest of Canaan, this would seem like an atonement made by giving away property belonging to somebody else.
What was done can't be undone. The international community needs the wisdom to find a way to bring peace in the conflict between Arab and Jew.
As for the rest of us - the powerless - we should understand the conflict has nothing to do with morals. It's about power. Israel is an ally of the West. It has a powerful military with nuclear weapons and a skilful espionage apparatus. A powerful ally must never be offended.
