Boulder, Colo.
In his first words pronounced publicly from Sunday’s horrible attack against a group of protesters who advocate the return of Israeli hostages in Gaza, Barbara Steinmetz told NBC News that what happened “has nothing to do with the Holocaust, has to do with a human being who wants to burn other people.”
Steinmetz said she and other group members who ran for their lives were demonstrating “peacefully” when they were suddenly attacked.
During a brief interview, Steinmetz still seemed to be shaken by the test.
“It’s about what is happening in our country,” said Steinmetz when he is pressed. “What the hell is happening?”
When asked if there was anything else that wanted the Americans to know after the attack, Steinmetz said that “people want people to be kind and decent, friendly, respectful, that it covers.”
“We are Americans,” he said. “We are better than this. That is what I want them to know. They are friendly 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 citizen named Mohamed Sabry Soliman.
Police said Soliman also threw Molotov cocktails into protesters.
The attack occurred 11 days after two workers from the Israeli embassy were shot dead and killed outside the Jewish Capital Museum in Washington.
Both in Boulder and Washington, authorities said, the alleged attackers shouted, “Palestine free.”
Rabbi Marc Soloway, the leader of the Bonai Shalom congregation in Boulder, where Steinmetz is a member, said the woman suffered minor burns but that “he will be well” physically.
Soloway said he was less sure of how someone who escaped from the Holocaust could process what happened in Pearl Street.
“Can you imagine the trauma that reactivates?” Soloway said. “It’s simply horrible.”
Soloway said Steinmetz was injured while participating in a weekly walk “purely to raise awareness about the fact that there are still 58 hostages in tunnels in Gaza.”
In addition to Steinmetz, another five members of his congregation were injured and two remained hospitalized, Soleway said.
The rabbi said Soliman, who has been accused of attempted murder and a hate crime, among other crimes, is “deceived and wrong.”
“If you think that an act of indescribable brutality and violence will help the condition of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza, they are so deceived and so wrong,” said the rabbi.
As for Steinmetz, much of his childhood was passed on an island off the coast of Croatia, which was then part of Italy and where his parents operated a hotel, according to the CU Independent, the student newspaper of the University of Colorado, Boulder, which published an article about it in 2019 for the week of the Holocaust Rememberium.
“I lived an idyllic childhood on the banks of the Adriatic,” Steinmetz recalled in the article.
But after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stripped the Italian Jews of his 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 his 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 his father requested asylum to a dozen countries, including the United States. But only one would take them: the Dominican Republic.
They left for Dr. in a Portuguese cargo ship in 1941 and during a brief stop in New York City, he could see the famous horizon of the city, he told The Independent.
Steinmetz said they were resettled in Sosúa’s coastal city, and while her parents worked in servile jobs, she and her sister were sent to a Catholic boarding school where only the upper mother knew 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 ended, the Steinmetz family was able to move to the United States, where their parents returned to the hotel business in New Hampshire.
Steinmetz moved to Boulder to “mid -2000s,” according to the article.
