Shoes. Books. Torah scrolls. Art. Hair. Children.

Photos by MONA REEDER/DMN

Diane Benjamin lighted the first remembrance light at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony Sunday at Congregation Tiferet Israel in Dallas. The event remembers 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

They all vanished during the Holocaust. By lighting torches Sunday to remember each loss, survivors and their families spoke out to ensure what they lost would not be forgotten.

The Yom Hashoah ceremony at Congregation Tiferet Israel in Dallas marked Holocaust Remembrance Day for the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II. And for those who survived.

James Hogue, president of the Dallas Holocaust Museum Center for Education and Tolerance, said the victims had no marked graves or tombstones.

"Here, we record their names," he said. "Here, we remember them all."

Helen Biderman was 11 when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and forced her family to live in a ghetto. The family eventually fled, with members hiding at one point in a chimney.

"It brings back the most terrible memories," Mrs. Biderman, 80, said after the ceremony.

But, said Mrs. Biderman, who moved to the United States in the late 1940s, it's better to remember than to forget.

Congregation Tiferet Israel Rabbi Shawn Zell recalled how Jews were robbed of their shoes and other personal belongings before they were sent to death or work camps. The items were often sent off to Germany and reused.

"Shoes were returned from Auschwitz and given a chance to live again," he said. "People were not."

He cited a poem by Moshe Szulsztein about shoes being eyewitnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust.

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.

We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers

From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam

And because we are only made of fabric and leather

And not of blood and flesh,

Each one of us avoided the hellfire.