Ruth David was 10 when she left Germany in June of 1939. The young girl fled from her home in Mannhein to England, where she grew up with a group of girls like herself, all separated from their families.

In May of 1939, when he was 13, Herbert David escaped with his family from Dusseldorf, Germany to Australia.

It’s been more than 50 years since World War II. More than 50 years since the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews and many others were killed. More than 50 years since the Davids were those exiled children.

There was a time when the Davids didn’t speak very much about their painful past.

“People who were involved don’t want to be reminded of bad things that happened to them, ” Ruth David explained. “That’s the experience, of all of us really who have been through this experience, that on the whole we’ve kept it quiet for half a century.”

“One hoped,” Ruth David said, “at the end of the war, after a very dreadful six years, one hoped it could never happen again.”

“The lesson seemed so clear,” her husband continued. “What could happen when people were dehumanized, then killed off.”

But Herbert David said, “We’ve come to realize that this is not something that happened in the distant past that won’t happen again.

“It is happening again. Not on the scale of 6 million, but in Bosnia, Rwanda. It is happening again,” he said.

In their own reserved manner, the Davids have decided the time has come to speak about their experiences as Jewish German children and to remind people of the horrors that happened in recent history.

The Davids will be participating in the Interfaith Holocaust Memorial Service, Yom Hashoah, today at 7:30 p.m. in the Gallery of the Memorial Union.

On Thursday, April 18, at 7 p.m., in the Ames Public Library, a discussion of the book All But My Life, by Gerda Weissmann Klein, will be led by Bob Bankirer, a child of survivor of the Holocaust.

During the memorial service tonight, Herbert David, a distinguished professor of statistics, will be reading a passage from his wife Ruth’s book A Child of Our Times. Ruth David wrote the book two years ago. It is to be published in Germany.

Ruth David said she did not intend to have the book published. It was written for her two children.

“It’s about my own childhood in Nazi Germany, and it’s about growing up as an adolescent in England and a child in Germany,” Ruth David said. “It describes from a child’s point of view what it was like living there at the time as an unwanted child. Not unwanted by my family but unwanted by my country.”

Ruth David said she didn’t speak to her children about her childhood because “I didn’t want to cloud their young lives.”

But she said “a number of us are thinking now that we ought to write and we ought to talk, otherwise, it will be forgotten.”

Through the memorial service tonight, Herbert and Ruth David said they hope to remind young people of the past in order to educate them.

“I would hope that they would realize that humanity can be good and it can be evil, and that it’s up to us to make the choices and to decide not to go along with what doubtful people in leadership positions tell us,” Ruth David said.