Noah Pozner Sandy Hook Shooting

4/21/2010 – Holocaust Museum

4/21/2010 – Holocaust Museum 

40 thoughts on “4/21/2010 – Holocaust Museum”


  1. He is Lenny. For I myself am not jewish, but have always had a great compassion for all of the adversities past and present. God bless you for being such a warm and compassionate man. The world needs more of you.


  2. Well said, Avis Fletcher. I am not Jewish either, but have always had a deep regard and emotional connection for those affected in the Holocaust. My husband’s grandmother was half Jewish, so my kids carry a small component of Jewish ancestry as well.


  3. Hi Lenny


    In tears. So sad and so touching at the same time. A lot of my dad’s family was lost in the Holocaust. He was able to escape when his family was taken. He ran away with a cousin, his cousin got scared and ran back home and was lost in the Holocaust. He was a little older than Noah, but I like to think he is up there looking after Noah and his friends. And looking at us and smiling.


    God Bless you Noah, God Bless you Lenny


  4. I remember visiting the Illinois Holocaust Museum about 5-10 minutes from my house.  It’s a very powerful experience.  I always say that we need to remember the Holocaust at least as long as people are still hating and killing each other.  I’m a German-American and even though I know my grandfather fought for the US in WWII (mostly in the Pacific) I wonder if he may have had cousins fighting for Germany.


  5. I think we should teach kids about the Holocaust in school. We were not taught about it when I was a kid, and to my knowledge, it isn’t on the curriculum. I did not take history in the latter part of high school, so if it was taught then, I wouldn’t know about it. In any case, I think it’s very important, as ugly a chapter in human history as it is, that every person learns about it and appreciates the gravity of the atrocities committed against a group of people hated for simply existing. We must strive to raise generations that will work toward ensuring that this can never happen again…ever.


  6. My two older sons are both taught this in middle school, and I am very concensus about teaching them at home as well to be concerned about world events, both past and present. The history channel is also a wonderful resource Ves.


  7. Ves, I do remember learning about the Holocaust in school.  You know what they say about how those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, that’s why we need to remember the Holocaust.  


  8. My 14 year old son, Ethan just got home from school. He says he believes next year in grade 10 they will touch on the Holocaust in history class.


  9. I don’t know Dan Geiger. We have a fairly well represented Jewish population, especially in Toronto. I think when I was a kid, they may have steered away from teaching in any real depth about the Holocaust out of perceived sensitivity of young minds, but I’m glad to hear from my son that it has changed and is now being taught in more complete depth. Of course, TV and Internet will show much more profoundly disturbing imagery, but this I feel is also necessary to appreciate the gravity of it all. No one should turn their eyes away from that horror.


  10. I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, but in Skokie, Illinois, very near where I live, the Nazi party had a rally, I think it was in the 70s and it cause an outrage as you would expect.  That’s where the Illinois Holocaust Museum is now.  Skokie has one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors in the US or did at one time.  I think right now there’s more emphasis on telling the story of the Holocaust and WWII, because there are so few survivors left and the ones that are still around are very old.


  11. Ves, I also follow a page on FB, Christians and Jews for Israel, that keeps me very up to date on more current issues in Israel. I was very surprised to learn that so many of Jewish faith live in Russia and face a lot of controversy there. I must admit, Noah was the reason that I took the time to educate myself more on Judism, just because I had to know. I am glad that I did because the Jewish faith teaches so much about compassion and humbleness.


  12. Very moving Lenny. IT was a horrible event in history when a group of men tried to turn the world into grave yard. We the family of man must never forget so this can never happen again. I agree with you Lenny, lm sure God has given Noah so much wisdom on the holocaust and that he understands how important the holocaust museum is and what it stands for.


  13. What a powerful picture Lenny. 


    I am German, so are all my antecedents. All male of both, my mother´s and father´s family side, went to war as soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, some as members of the SS, doing the “special duties”. 


    Very few returned.


    What was left of my father’s family, the women and children, were removed from their homes in eastern Germany, Silesia, what later became Poland, as the Russians “moved” Poland further west to gain territory for the Soviet Union in the east.


    As they had to run for their lives in January 1945, walking through the snow, my father was 3 months old. They got to the city of Dresden, the “Eastern Venice”, and got on a transport going out of the main train station of the city 24 hours before the city was bombed by the Allied, leaving not one stone on another in the whole city center, killing thousands. 


    My father´s mother never returned to her birth town Posen, today Poznan in Poland, nor did any of her family. My mother’s grandfather never returned to his birth town Breslau, today Wroclaw in Poland, nor did any one of the family. They all had to start a new life as refugees in western parts of Germany and they were lucky after all, having survived. 


    The last thing I remember my grandmother say is how she would have loved to return to “die Heimat” and how she would have loved to see her oldest son again, whom she had lost as a 5-year old on their “Flucht” going west and had never seen him again. 


    We went to my grandmothers house the first time two years ago and found Polish people living there now. They still had the same fence and the same attic windows as in the old photographs and the man of the house invited us to self made wine and liquor which were excellent. They told us that their family had come there from Ukraine where they had been thrown out by the Russians. We went back there last summer and had some more liquor. This year we sent them a Happy New Year´s greeting card and we’ll go there again this summer. They have a little grandson, about Noah´s age and they enjoyed playing together in my grandmother´s garden. She had always told us about a nut tree that they had planted and it is huge now. And about the wild raspberries in the garden. And we ate some of them. The little grandson is a Real Madrid soccer fan and wore a blue and white RM wrist band and we promised him to bring him an authentic soccer jersey from Madrid on our next visit to his home, I like to think it´s our home too. I post you some pictures on the other page if you like to see them.


    War is the worst thing, for everyone involved, at any time in human history, present and future. For the single person who looses his or her life violently, the reason, the cause doesn´t matter, they are dead, betrayed of their future, their potential. 


    I have been a German child and remember clearly how they taught us in school that we were guilty, that our people were guilty of genocide. They took us to concentration camps to visit. I was in Auschwitz twice. They showed us movies there and we went to the gas chambers and the crematorium. We walked past the piles of old shoes, human hair. Last summer we took young Noah to Breslau´s White Storch Synagogue, the birth house of Willy Cohn in Breslau´s city center who is the author of No justice in Germany The Breslau diaries, which I can truly recommend


    http://www.amazon.com/No-Justice-Germany-Breslau-1933-1941/dp/0804773246/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423230180&sr=8-1&keywords=willy+cohn
     and the Old Jewish Cemetery on the city´s south side with some of the graves of the Cohn family. Willy Cohn´s name is there too, but his body is not. He was deported in 1941 from the White Storch Synagogue to Kaunas in the occupied Lithuania. A few days later, Willy Cohn, his wife Gertrud and their two daughters, Susanne and Tamara were killed by Germans along with 2000 other Jews from Breslau and Vienna. Noah wanted to put stones on their grave stone, as we had seen it in a movie   and said that this way “our thoughts and tears will stay with them and comfort them”


    In Breslau we also saw the last name Posner. There were many Jews with the name Posner living in Breslau before 1941. Posner is the German version for Pozner, as the German s and the English z are being pronounced in the same way. When we were in Breslau I had to think of you Lenny. There is a nice kind of courtyard in front of the Synagogue with a cafe and a bar. We were sitting there with a big polish LECH and there were Jewish people sitting at the table next to us. They wore the kippa and I remembered the pictures of you and Noah wearing it too. I think of you and your Noah EVERY day, there isn´t one day that my thought wouldn´t go to you. I´m not Jewish, but I thought of you a lot on our trip to Poland and as I saw the name Posner I wondered whether your family maybe came from there. I once read in Noah´s birth certificate that you were born in one of the Baltic states. Do you know where your family came from? 


    No German kid would not know the word “Holocaust”. But then, generally, it feels far away from you. I just cannot relate to that time. I haven´t been there. I haven´t lived then. I can´t feel what people might have felt then. I can just imagine it. And that’s not the same. I have not been exposed to the Nazi propaganda and have never experienced war. I am very grateful for that, but I am also conscious that I am exposed to some other kind of propaganda nowadays and I can see war on the internet, past wars and present wars. But we can just see glimpses. We can see German SS killing Jews, Allied soldiers killing German civilians, in black and white, we can see drones lay cities in ashes, we can see Russian tanks roll into Ukraine, but officially they’re not there, we can see people burn, in color, HD. We can watch it, if we want to, but after all, we are just in the same position than people to any time in the past. We can’t do much about it and we just have to hope that the ones in command are somehow slightly more reasonable than to other times in the past.


    In Europe, we hope that the visit of the German Chancellor Merkel and the French President Hollande in Moscow today at Vladimir Putin’s will lead to some kind of easing of tensions in Ukraine. 


    http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/ukraine-krise-merkel-und-hollande-verhandeln-mit-putin-a-1017017.html


    Hollande said yesterday on French television that it would be a Total War in Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia if their mission should fail. And on German television they reported yesterday that the NATO has already mobilized troops to station ground forces in the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria, on the eastern NATO borders. We are all asking ourselves where this is going. People get killed there every day, as in hundreds of other places on our planet. Usually, one side wants to show the other side what’s on, they want to put the others in their place, instead of putting themselves in their place and show a minimum of empathy.


    Sending you warm regards from Spain


  14. I don’t really know what I want to say here today Lenny. My first reaction is that I’m happy to see you were beginning to show Noah the sides of our humanity & history that are dark as well as those that are beautiful & creative. I know that as he was possessed of such a capable mind & intelligent nature he would have absorbed so much more had he had the opportunity. His sisters, fortunately, will be able to continue their journeys with you putting them in touch with their Jewish heritage. So important to do.


    On our last 2 trips to Berlin the boys have been able to learn a little about the history of that city. Our then-6 year old noticed the brass markers in the pavement outside many buildings ( detailing the names & dates of mostly Jews taken from their homes) & asked us to read them out. Sadly there are so very many. We always notice them now. So that lead to a conversation about the Holocaust & on to the evil that can be done by humans with twisted ideology. (Twisted awfully pertinent to the sorry state of current affairs in the Middle East today) . We kept it as simple as possible for 6 & 8 years old & included stories of bravery & survival they did pretty well. They have been able to learn a little about Judaism through those visits as well, thanks to stumbling across Jewish cafes, eating Kosher food & even playing with dreidels in a lovely toy shop we found. These are experiences not available to them where we live right now. They know Noah was Jewish & they remembered his photo holding the Hannukah candle & wearing his cap ( forgive me I cannot recall the name) when they had a chance to put one on in Berlin. So for them, they got to see that although they understand the parallels in their lives with Noah’s; the daily activities like going to school, playing superheroes & listening to Gangnam Style, there was another part of Noah, his Jewishness, that is akin to the other part of them.The extra dimension. It was sort of the way you smile when you make friends with someone you really ” get”. It was like a penny dropped when they were putting on those caps & looking at Menorahs in that shop. It was so tangible to them. I cannot pretend to be an expert on even my own faith but I do know that it is a good thing, a VERY good thing if our children grow up feeling the similarities rather than fearing the differences between us all.


    So now I’m back to the picture you have posted. Your comment about viewing this moment as Noah becoming part of the sculpture has made me sadder tonight but I look for comfort in the knowledge that by showing him this place, his parents were ensuring experiences & opportunities for him & will continue doing so for his sisters.


  15. Hi Lenny, hope you and your family are doing well. It must be tough dealing with the crazy weather you are experiencing. Hang in there. Had a tough day today. Thinking of Noah and seeing his beautiful smile made my day alot better.Noah will never be forgotten , and always be loved. Take care Lenny.


  16. I come here a lot to look at this picture in particular. The image spurs thoughts, both beautiful and haunting. But it’s also a source of fuel, a motivator. It keeps me focused.

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