Dachau. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nov. 5, 1938. Kristallnacht. Six million Jews. Eleven million people.

Memories of places and events too evil to have been imagined and people too young and too many to have been forgotten came back with vivid detail and emotion on Tuesday night.

About 100 members of the Jewish community at Iowa State and in Ames along with other mourners gathered in the Gallery of the Memorial Union on Tuesday to remember and honor the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust.

Songs of worship and of mourning, testimonies of survivors and children of survivors, poems and fragments of historical memoirs and biblical readings brought tears and silence to the group.

Herbert David, an ISU statistics professor, read from his wife Ruth’s recently written book about her experiences as a child in Nazi Germany. The reading was a memory of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Glass,” when vandals and thugs destroyed Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses all over Germany, and when 100 Jewish men were killed and many others taken to concentration campus.

Ruth David introduced the reading by saying, “I am a child survivor — just. For every child survivor like me, 13 European Jewish children died.”

The reading recalled Ruth David as a small child, escaping with her sister in nightgown and bare feet into the night as her home was vandalized and her father and brother taken. Her “dear uncle” had been hurled down the stairs in his wheelchair. “I wish he had died then. As it was, he had to live three more years of martyrdom,” before dying in a camp.

Barbara Pleasants, an ISU biology professor who also teaches a course about the Holocaust, spoke of her Uncle Gary, whose home in Poland was occupied by Nazis while he lived in a small compartment in the wall with his brother Leon. For one and a half years they spent their days standing in the small, paneled section with their backs flat against the wall. During the night, they stretched out their bodies on the bare kitchen table while the Germans slept in their bedrooms.

After they were liberated by Russians, her uncle suffered from swollen and damaged legs and feet, but he never spoke of his experiences during those times.

Bob Bankirer, an Ames resident whose mother “survived by way of Siberia,” and whose father lived through Dachau, said the evening was “about faces without names. Stories that will never be told. Families that will never live up to their dreams. Children that will never grow up. For me, these are visions that I see every day.”

Sonia Hockerman’s mother was also a Holocaust survivor. “My mother has a number in her arm: 35673,” she said. Hockerman, a post-doctoral student in the veterinary college, said “We must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million; it was one plus one plus one.”

Eleven candles were lit in memory of the victims — Jews, men, women, children, Gypsies, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped and others.

Nate Bankirer, Bob Bankirer’s young son, lit a candle “in memory of children and infants too young to understand what was happening to them.”

Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was said for all of the victims and survivors.

The memorial service ended with hope as the group professed belief “in the sun, even when it is not shining… in love, even when feeling it not… in God, even when God is silent.”

A closing song, from the book of Psalms, was sang in Hebrew by the entire group. “How good and how pleasant when we all live together as brothers and sisters!”