Holocaust survivor who was burned in the Colorado terror attack breaks her silence
Barbara Steinmetz spoke out to condemn the attack on Sunday, where at least 12 people were injured when suspect Mohamed Soliman allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel protest, but said the community would recover.
'We are better than this,' she told NBC News.
The 88-year-old said she and other members of the Run for their Lives event were 'peacefully' demonstrating when the attack unfolded.
'It's about what the hell is going on in our country,' Steinmetz continued. 'What the hell is going on?'
Steinmetz's family fled Italy and Hungary to escape the Nazis decades ago, but said the attack on Sunday had 'nothing to do with the Holocaust, it has to do with a human being that wants to burn other people.'
The outlet said Steinmetz appeared to still be rattled by the shock attack, but said she just wanted 'people to be nice and decent to each other, kind, respectful, encompassing.'
'We're Americans,' she said. 'We are better than this. That's what I want them to know. That they be kind and decent human beings.'
Police said Soliman screamed 'Free Palestine' as he threw the Molotov cocktails at the protestors, and he is now facing 16 counts of attempted murder as well as federal hate crime charges.
Rabbi Marc Soloway, the leader of Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, where Steinmetz is a member, said the elderly woman suffered minor burns but is 'going to be okay.'
Soloway added that although Steinmetz will recover, he wondered how someone who survived the Holocaust would process the anti-Israel attack.
'Can you imagine the trauma that that reactivates?' the rabbi said. 'It's just horrendous.'
Steinmetz, an active and visible member of Boulder's Jewish community since she and her late husband moved from Michigan 20 years ago, was born in 1936 in her parents' native Hungary.
Shortly after her birth, they returned to Italy, where they'd run an island hotel since the 1920s – but as Steinmetz progressed through her toddler years, it was becoming more and more dangerous for Jews in Europe.
Steinmetz fled with her parents and sister in 1940 to Hungary, but her father saw the dangers there, too, and quickly planned to get out of the country.
'My dad encouraged the rest of my family to leave,' Steinmetz told CU Boulder students at a 2019 talk. 'They were scared — they simply couldn't envision what was to come…or that their friends [and] customers would turn on them.'
As their family and Jews suffered increasingly under Hitler's regime, her 'cousin stole a Nazi uniform and brought food into the ghetto and caused plenty of mischief to the Nazis,' Steinmetz wrote in 2014 in a Holocaust film review.
Her father eventually fled with his wife and children to France, then Portugal, then the Dominican Republic, stopping at Ellis Island on the way just for processing. The island nation's dictator, Rafael Trujillo, had agreed to accept Jewish refugees, and a Jewish resettlement organization established a community at Sosua.
'Sosua was an abandoned banana plantation … and these bedraggled refugees, doctors and lawyers and professors, came to this piece of land where there was one building we all slept,' Steinmetz said in an interview posted to Instagram in April.
'And there was water, and the women did the cooking, and the men tried to do the agriculture.'
After four years of attending a Dominican Catholic school, telling no one she was Jewish or European, Steinmetz and her family were granted visas to the US.
She and her sister immediately began attending Jewish summer camps, where they 'knew no one and didn't speak any English,' Boulder Jewish News reported five years ago, as Boulder JCC prepared to honor Steinmetz at its annual gala.
The camps 'offered the opportunity to excel in sports and exposed them to what it means to be a Jew,' it continued.
The family eventually settled in Detroit, where her mother ran the lunchroom at the Jewish Community Center (JCC), which became Steinmetz's 'home in America,' the outlet reported.
'Barb met and married Howard while still a teenager and college student. They moved to Saginaw, Michigan when she was a young mom,' it continued. 'They built a life there around Jewish community.'
The Steinmetz had three daughters – Ivy, Julie and Monica – and lived in Saginaw for decades before moving to Boulder two decades ago.
They left Michigan after filing suit against Dow Chemical over alleged dioxin poisoning on their property.
Both Ivy and Howard Steinmetz died of cancer, ten months apart, in 2011.
Steinmetz has been a frequent featured speaker in Colorado, sharing her experience as a Holocaust survivor for students and local groups as recently as March. She has been a vocal Jewish presence in Boulder for decades.
Steinmetz's son-in-law, Bruce Shaffer, is a co-lead of Run for Their Lives, which orchestrated the event attacked on Sunday. The Shaffers split their time between Boulder and Jerusalem.
Steinmetz had previously expressed fears about anti-Semitism and hate finding her in Boulder, writing to city authorities in 2016 to oppose the establishment of Nablus, in Palestine, as a sister city – which ultimately went ahead.
'I AM NEAR 80 YEARS OLD.....AM I ONCE AGAIN HAVE TO DEAL WITH ANTI - JEWISH SENTIMENT IN MY OWN TOWN?' she wrote to Boulder's council in a letter publicly available online. 'HAVE I NOT COME TO AMERICA WHERE I CAN FIND PEACE.....PLEASE DON'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME AND MY COMMUNITY OF VERY ACTIVE CIVIC CITIZENS.'
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