Something had changed about them since the information had been passed around. They'd gone from being possible Litvaks to almost celebrity status. Most of us had never seen survivors before; all of our families had been in Canada long before World War One and didn't have to worry about being caught up in the fires of the Holocaust. Our parents and grandparents had lived out the war in school and the war factories, so this was the closest any of us had ever come to tangible contact with people who had been through those horrors.

We all wanted them to be special, and might have each been a little disappointed in how ordinary they were. Two very quiet people in normal clothes that didn't quite fit properly, who were quieter than the adults we were used to. I don't know what we expected for our first survivors, but being raised on images of fighters, two little mice-like creatures that leaned into each other for protection was a slight disappointment.

We were driving home that evening after the meal, with no staying around afterwards to talk with anyone, so I was left alone with my confusion. Why did we use the same word for where I went to spend weeks during the summer as was used to describe those places where millions — a number far too big for anybody really to understand — of people died?

Obviously not all of them who entered the camps had died, some of them had walked away, somehow or other, and I saw two of them that night. Two very ordinary people who, unless you saw them in the company of others, really were no different to look at, which made it even harder to understand what had happened to them.

The lights of the oncoming cars as we traveled down the highway back to Ottawa that night could have been the search lights in a camp or the flashlights of campers out on a walk at night in the woods. Sometimes it was so hard to tell things apart.