BOSTON (WHDH) - On Tuesday, Susan and Kurt Schwartz remembered the 1,2000 lives lost when Hamas attacked Israel two years ago.
“This is a day to remember. A day that should bring back memories of the horrific, horrible things that happened two years ago in Israel and really changed the path of history,” Kurt said.
Shortly after the terrorist attack in 2023, the couple created a memorial to the victims in their Concord yard as a way to keep what happened so far away in the minds of those close to home.
“If people don’t remember, it will happen over and over again,” Susan said.
On the anniversary, they invited the community to a memorial service among their 1,200 Israeli flags.
“For weeks we were looking for our friends, still hoping maybe they could be alive,” Noa Beer said, who survived the Nova Music Festival.
Beer survived the attack on the Nova Music Festival where hundreds were killed and kidnapped. She is in Boston promoting a new exhibit about it, hoping that by viewing actual items from the festival, like charred cars and bullet-ridden bathroom stalls, people will have a better understanding of what happened that fateful day.
“We need to come here and deliberately haunt ourselves to see what that kind of hate and dehumanization is,” Mass. congressman Jake Auchincloss said.
Adina Troen-Krasnow lost her cousins on October 7 when the couple jumped on top of their son to protect him as Hamas terrorists attacked their home.
“I don’t want them to be forgotten,” Troen-Krasnow said. “I don’t want any of the 1,200 people forgotten.”
Unable to find the right words to honor them, Troen-Krasnow is doing it through her art, at an exhibit in Needham called “Because Tomorrow Isn’t Promised.”
“I said to my cousin, the last time I spoke to her ‘I’ll see you soon’. She was supposed to come to the states and were were going to see each other,” Troen-Krasnow said.
As ceasefire talks move forward between Israel and Hamas, the anniversary also gives hope for a brighter tomorrow.
“I was thinking if the war ends, I would love to put 1,2000 sunflowers here,” Susan said.
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