The first items you see are glistening bits of glass on the ground near the entryway. Then comes a bed of creeping thyme, a bookshelf of candles, a red-hued hearth and, finally, a wood plank roof.

This is the Price Family Holocaust Memorial Garden at Utah’s I.J. and Jeanné Wagner Jewish Community Center in east Salt Lake City. Its stark outdoor space is an abstract expression of a house torn apart, its familial elements standing separately. It is meant to symbolize what was lost on that fateful Nov. 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) — and also what has been reborn.

On that night, Nazi forces conducted mass riots against Germany’s Jewish population. Synagogues were burned, Torahs torched, the windows of Jewish homes and shops smashed, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

More than 75 people gathered Monday at the community center to rededicate the renovated garden, to pray, light candles and remember the horrors that happened 88 years ago.

Five-year-old John Price was among those shocked and frightened by the violent mob, cowering inside with family as his father’s shops were destroyed.

“The Nazi Holocaust began the same year I was born,” the now 93-year-old Price said at the ceremony. “Jewish people were stripped of their civil jobs, and boycotts began against Jewish businesses. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jewish people of their citizenship, access to education, healthcare, employment and quality of life.”

Fearing his family would be targets, Price’s father “made plans to leave Germany with visas to Panama. My father, mother, brother and I fled on April 8, 1939, on an empty freighter returning to Panama,” said Price, a successful Salt Lake City businessman and philanthropist. “In September 1940, we were fortunate to receive visas to the United States, and so began our story of building a new life in America.”

Most of his relatives perished in concentration camps, said Price, a former U.S. ambassador to Mauritius, Comoros and Seychelles — islands off the southeast coast of Africa.

The Price Family Holocaust Memorial Garden opened Sept. 12, 2002, he said, “as a tribute to 6 million Jewish people who perished and to those who miraculously survived.”

Monday’s event was a commemoration of the renovated space, “which is no less urgent today than 20 years ago,” Price said. “We are again living in a critical time amid the rise of antisemitism around the globe, with great anger against Jewish people and the state of Israel.”

It was only a few short months ago “that we commemorated 9/11 and a month after that was October 7th [marking the 2023 Hamas-led attacks in Israel],” noted Rabbi Benny Zippel, leader of Chabad Lubavitch of Utah. “What we learn from these days is that at a moment of the ultimate atrocity and sadness and grief, you see the best of people come out. At the same time, you see the worst in people. That same rule applies to the Holocaust.”

Kristallnacht brought out “the very, very worst in people, and yet at the same time, we’re privileged to see the best in people,” he said, pointing to the Prices, “who have chosen to transform the evil of the Holocaust into a catalyst for goodness.”

Zippel’s mother grew up in Holland and was in the same concentration camp as Anne Frank, the rabbi said. “[My mother] was the only one [in her family] to survive the Holocaust, and many times she shared with us as kids: ‘Why was it me? Why did I survive it when my sister and brothers and other relatives did not?’ What she finally understood was it was because she had to bring out the best in herself and the best in others.”

And because survivors were needed, he said, to tell the story.

“What we remember depends on what we choose to teach,” said Raquel Scharf-Anderson, the JCC’s CEO. “Judaism has always known this. We do not only remember. We tell stories, led door by door, from generation to generation, because the people we love deserve to know where they come from and what we must never allow to happen again.”

The rededication of the garden “is a powerful reminder of the importance of Holocaust education, especially at a time when Holocaust denial and antisemitism are growing so dramatically,” said Patrice Arent, a former state senator. “We must never forget the past and ensure that future generations understand the atrocities committed in World War II.”