When Ruth Schwager's husband passed away in 1964, he made her a promise: His grave would stand as a memorial to her slain parents, who were reduced to ashes in Nazi "death camps" at Auschwitz and Teresianstadt.

His tombstone bears their names - Arthur and Clara Teutsch - and it is the only tangible memory Ruth Schwager has of that hideous time in German history, when one man's furious hate sent more than 6 million Jews to their deaths. The 93-year-old has blocked out most other memories of her time in Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 - even the good ones. They've all gone "rotten."

"The bad memories outweigh the others," she said. "Too much went wrong."

Sunday marks the 60th anniversary of Germany's surrender in World War II, and thousands of Jews throughout the world Thursday observed Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

More than 150 members of Utah's small Jewish community gathered at the Salt Lake City Main Library auditorium Friday to reflect and pray for the untold numbers of victims, some their own relatives, who perished in the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz, the name that has come to symbolize the three main Nazi concentration camps and 45 to 50 smaller facilities that were spread throughout Nazi-controlled Europe.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has declared Sunday through May 14 "Days of Remembrance Week" to commemorate the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Yet, ironically, Ruth Schwager would rather forget the past. She is here now, in America, and this is "very definitely" home.

"I try not to think back," she said, sitting in her front-row seat at Friday's event, where she was invited to light a candle emblazoned with the Star of David. "I try not to think back."

Her brush with Hitler's terror had been too close.

Once, in 1938, the Nazis or the police - "they were one and the same" - came knocking. They were looking for Joseph Schwager. It was a time when Jews in the city of Augsburg, Germany, which they called home, were being rounded up and taken away to be branded with tattoos on their forearms. The "extermination camps" weren't built yet.

Ruth Schwager answered the door with a great deal of trepidation.

"He's not home," she told the men, while her husband bounded out of a rear window and ran into the woods.

Providentially, the Nazi officers left the Schwagers alone. The family fled Germany for England and then the United States, making their home in Utah in 1944.

Others weren't so lucky. The stink of decaying flesh filled the air at Auschwitz, Poland, where everyone who didn't fit Hitler's vision of Aryan perfection - Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and other minorities - met a grisly end.

Some estimates place the toll at 11 million, including the Jews.

Many did everything they could to escape the horror that awaited them.

Kathren Brown, an assistant professor of history at Utah Valley State College, told a hushed audience how her great-grandfather was tortured by pleas from families with the same last name, who wrote imploring him to claim them as relatives. Some begged him to save their children. It was the only way they could travel to the United States to escape persecution.

The letters depressed Brown's great-grandfather so much they were kept locked away in a bureau.

"When my mother was young in the early 1950s, it wasn't uncommon for him to get incredibly drunk, get the key to the bureau, open the letters and read them, all the while sobbing hysterically," Brown said.

"Eventually, he would pass out and my great-grandmother would clean up my great-grandfather and the letters, lock the drawer, and basically wait for the next time, which was always not too far away."

For Brown and many younger members of the Jewish community, the challenge now is to do what Ruth Schwager chooses not to do, and what her great-grandfather died doing. Brown puts it this way: "The best we can offer to the unnamed dead or the distant victims is the justice of remembrance."

To forget would be to risk the tyranny of another Hitler, to allow history to repeat itself. And that's something Ruth Schwager is quick to caution against.

"It can repeat," she said matter-of-factly. "It does repeat."