Rysia Kraskin was a young woman, still a girl really, but already looking drawn when the Nazis began sorting the Jews into two lines - those who would live and those who would die.

It was another Polish girl who snuck her a bit of red lipstick to rub on her cheeks, creating the illusion of health. The ruse worked. Rysia was allowed to live.

She survived the Second World War concentration camps and became known as a warm and generous soul in Victoria where, after her death in 2006, she was buried in the Jewish cemetery - two steps away from one of the grave markers spray-painted with an ugly black swastika early this New Year's Eve.

Her friend Helen Jacobs, the one who gave her the lipstick, is buried near another of the desecrated graves. This one bore not just a swastika, but a scrawled "Jewish scum."

In total, swastikas were painted on five graves in the 153-year-old Cedar Hill Road cemetery.

Really? In Victoria? Today?

Most of us are guilty of bigotry, in some form, at some time. But anti-Semitism seems particularly anachronistic, the stuff - Mel Gibson notwithstanding - of grim, grainy, black and white images from long ago and far away.

The question now is whether this was a virulent anti-Semite at work or just vandalism by some drunken goof stirring up trouble - though it's hard to say "just vandalism" when the graffiti is a swastika and the target a Jewish cemetery.

"Did this person really know what it means?" asked Rabbi Harry Brechner on Tuesday, standing among gravestones that had been coated with solvent and wrapped in plastic, awaiting repair. "Did this person really know what Nazism is?"

Brechner wants to know what kind of person would do this - or would at least like the vandal to man up and take responsibility. "I'm not hoping for punishment. I have disgust for the act, but I hope the person is someone who can learn from this." Victoria police, meanwhile, are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

The good news, in a way, is that the desecration is news. We forget that anti-Semitism is common in some parts of the world. Here, not so much. Brechner has seen some minor vandalism at the cemetery, but nothing like this.

At one time, the use of a swastika might have seemed a prank. In 1939, just a few months before the war, Oak Bay High grad Pierre Berton and some buddies, after downing a bottle of rye, followed by beer at the Six Mile pub, decided to paint the old Pandora lighthouse red.

When doing so became too difficult, they decided to raise the spectre of fascism as an alternative. "Two of us managed to daub on the facade a large but ragged swastika, the only symbol we could think of that was suitably rude," Berton wrote in the autobiographical Starting Out.

That was before the Holocaust, before the murder of six million, and at a time when Jews faced widespread discrimination in Canada, as Berton himself found out when writing a story for Maclean's magazine in 1948. "All the major professions - engineering, the judiciary, higher education, brokerage, banking - were virtually closed to Jews," Berton recalled in yet another memoir, My Times.

For that 1948 piece, Berton tested a tacit hiring ban by having two women reply to 47 employment ads under fictitious names. "Miss Grimes" got appointments with 41 of the employers, "Miss Greenberg" with just 17. That really wasn't that long ago. I don't remember learning that in history class. (Nor did they teach us about how Canada turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish-German refugees in 1939.)

Brechner said he believes Canada has changed. Most people here were shocked by the weekend graffiti. "This isn't who we are," he said. Victorians, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have offered to help with the restoration.

Brechner isn't holding his breath, but hopes the vandal will come forward and accompany him on a tour of the cemetery.

"I would like to give him the opportunity to make it right, to help us clean up, to learn about Rysia and some of the others buried here."

jknox@timescolonist.com