An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was among a dozen people injured in Sunday’s terrorist attack on a group advocating for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, delivered a powerful message to America on Tuesday: “We are better than this.”
In her first public comments since the gruesome attack involving a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails on Pearl Street, 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 for thw 58 Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza when they were suddenly attacked. Eight victims, ranging in age from 52 to 88, were admitted to the hospital with burns, with two remaining hospitalized as of Tuesday.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, an Egyptian national, has been charged with 16 counts of attempted murder and hate crimes in connection with Sunday’s assault. Authorities said he posed as a gardener to get closer to the group of Jewish protesters, before launching into his lethal attack. The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of terror and targeted violence.
Despite suffering burns herself, Steinmetz’s resilience and moral clarity shone through her words. During the brief interview, she still appeared rattled by the ordeal. “It’s about what the hell is going on in our country,” she said when pressed. “What the hell is going on?”
Her words carry particular weight given her personal history of persecution and survival Born in Hungary, much of her childhood was spent on an island off the coast of Croatia, which was then part of Italy, where her parents operated a hotel.
“I lived an idyllic childhood on the banks of the Adriatic,” she recalled in a 2019 article in the CU Independent.
But after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship in 1938, Steinmetz’s father moved the family to Hungary and then to France two years later. When the Germans entered France, the family was forced to flee again, this time to Portugal, where thousands of other refugees were seeking escape from Europe.
Her father applied for asylum to a dozen countries, including the United States, but only the Dominican Republic would accept them. The family departed on a Portuguese cargo ship in 1941, with a brief stop in New York City where young Barbara glimpsed the city’s famous skyline.
The family was resettled in the coastal town of Sosúa, where while her parents worked menial jobs, she and her sister attended a Catholic boarding school where only the Mother Superior knew they were Jewish.
“For four years, the convent was our home,” Steinmetz recalled. “Although formidable, the sisters were kind.”
The Dominican Republic chapter of her life represented a rare moment of stability during the war years, when her family found safety while much of Europe burned. It was a sanctuary that allowed her to survive when so many others did not. After the war ended, the Steinmetz family was able to move to the United States, where her parents returned to the hotel business in New Hampshire. Steinmetz moved to Boulder in the mid-2000s.
Now, more than 80 years after fleeing Nazi persecution, Steinmetz finds herself once again the victim of antisemitic violence. Yet her response reflects not bitterness but a profound faith in American values and human decency. When asked what Americans should know, she said she “wants people to be nice and decent to each other, kind, respectful, encompassing.”
“We’re Americans,” she emphasized. “We are better than this. That’s what I want them to know. That they be kind and decent human beings.”
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