BOULDER, Colo. — The 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned during an attack by a man armed with a “makeshift flamethrower” had a message on Tuesday for the rest of America: “We are better than this.”
In her first words spoken publicly since Sunday’s gruesome attack on a group of demonstrators advocating for the return of Israeli hostages in Gaza, Barbara Steinmetz told NBC News that what happened “has nothing to do with the Holocaust, it has to do with a human being that wants to burn other people.”
Steinmetz said she and other members of the group Run for Their Lives were “peacefully” demonstrating when they were suddenly attacked.
During a brief interview, Steinmetz still appeared to be rattled by the ordeal.
“It’s about what the hell is going on in our country,” Steinmetz said when pressed. “What the hell is going on?”
Asked if there was anything more she wanted Americans to know after the attack, Steinmetz said she “wants 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.”
Steinmetz, who was born in Hungary, was among a dozen people who were injured in the attack allegedly carried out by a 45-year-old Egyptian national named Mohamed Sabry Soliman.
Police said Soliman also hurled Molotov cocktails at the demonstrators.
The attack occurred 11 days after two Israeli Embassy workers were gunned down and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.
In both Boulder and Washington, authorities said, the alleged attackers yelled, “Free Palestine.”
Rabbi Marc Soloway, the leader of Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, where Steinmetz is a member, said the woman suffered minor burns but is “going to be OK” physically.
Soloway said he was less sure about how someone who escaped the Holocaust could process what happened on Pearl Street.
“Can you imagine the trauma that that reactivates?” Soloway said. “It’s just horrendous.”
Soloway said Steinmetz was injured while taking part in a weekly walk “purely to raise awareness of the fact that there are still 58 hostages in tunnels in Gaza.”
In addition to Steinmetz, five other members of his congregation were injured and two remain hospitalized, Soloway said.
The rabbi said Soliman, who has been charged with attempted murder and a hate crime, among other offenses, is “deluded and misguided.”
“If he thinks that an act of unspeakable brutality and violence is going to help the condition of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza, he is so deluded and so misguided,” the rabbi said.
As for Steinmetz, much of her childhood was spent on an island off the coast of Croatia, which was then part of Italy and where her parents operated a hotel, according to the CU Independent, the student newspaper at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which published an article about her in 2019 for Holocaust remembrance week.
“I lived an idyllic childhood on the banks of the Adriatic,” Steinmetz recalled in the article.
But after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stripped the Italian Jews of their citizenship in 1938, Steinmetz’s father took the family to Hungary and from there they fled to France two years later.
When the Germans entered France, Steinmetz and her family were forced to flee again, this time to Portugal, where thousands of other refugees were looking for a way to escape from Europe.
Steinmetz said her father applied for asylum to a dozen countries, including the United States. But only one would take them — the Dominican Republic.
They departed for the DR on a Portuguese cargo ship in 1941 and during a brief stop in New York City she got to see the city’s famous skyline, she told the Independent.
Steinmetz said they were resettled in the coastal town of Sosúa, and while her parents toiled at menial jobs, she and her sister were sent to a Catholic boarding school where only the Mother Superior knew that they were Jews.
“For four years, the convent was our home,” Steinmetz recalled in the article. “Although formidable, the sisters were kind.”
Once the war was over, the Steinmetz family was able to move to the United States, where her parents went back into the hotel business in New Hampshire.
Steinmetz moved to Boulder in “the mid-2000s,” according to the article.
