Holocaust Survivor Speaks After Boulder Attack: 'We Are Better Than This'
Barbara Steinmetz survived the Holocaust as a child, fleeing from one country to the next as her Jewish family was stripped of its citizenship.
They left Italy for Hungary, then to France and finally Portugal before finding refuge outside Europe in the Dominican Republic. The first five years of her life with her big sister, Margaret, and her parents was a blur of escapes, never with anything more than what they could carry.
The one thing that remained constant: The family stayed together.
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It’s a message that resonates with her nearly 90 years later and why she was marching in Boulder on June 1. She was part of a small group bringing attention to the Jewish hostages held by Hamas to bring them home when she was attacked . A man threw Molotov cocktails at the group, injuring 12 people.
Steinmetz, 88, told NBC News she and other members of the group Run for Their Lives were peacefully demonstrating when they were attacked.
"We’re Americans. We are better than this,” she told the news outlet. They should be “kind and decent human beings."
Steinmetz spent much of her life trying not to talk about what her family endured. Her father’s message to her was always to move to forward.
In 1998, she sat down to share her story with the University of Southern California’s Shoah project , which documents the lives of Holocaust survivors. In an interview stretching almost three hours, Steinmetz talked about her family’s escape, the relatives who died in the war, and the lessons they learned.
She was 61 when she did the Shoah interview , one of thousands of 52,000 stories recorded over eight years.
“Family is what’s most important,” Steinmetz said.
She was too young to remember much about her family leaving Italy in 1938 when Benito Mussolini stripped Jewish people of their citizenship at the direction of Adolf Hitler. What she remembers, she said in the interview, was an atmosphere of trauma.
Her father, who had run a hotel on the northern Italian coast after leaving Hungary, visited embassies and wrote letters to various countries to try to move his family as Hitler’s power grew. Each time, their move was temporary. Each time, they brought only what they could carry. But each time, they stayed together.
“Things were not important − people are important. What you have in your brain and in your heart that is the only thing that’s important,” she said. “And that’s totally transportable.”
In the past few years, Steinmetz has told her family’s story at Holocaust remembrance events and classrooms, libraries and churches. She wants people to understand history to understand that Jewish people are being targeted again.
“Hitler basically took (my father’s) life, his dream away. ... The rest of life was chasing, running, trying to make a living."
The family eventually settled in Sosúa, where the Dominican Republic Resettlement Association (DORSA) had established a refugee camp for Jewish people. Life was difficult there, she said: Her family and had to learn to build houses, farm the rocky terrain and raise their families.
Steinmetz and her sister, three years older, were soon sent to a Catholic school, where only the head nun knew they were Jewish. A nun used to let her change the clothes of the Baby Jesus figurine at the church, and for a few minutes each day, she felt as if she had a doll.
She remembers sleeping next to her sister and crying inconsolably.
“I never cried again. Years and years and years later, when something happened, my mother and father died, I had a hard time crying. And to this day, I have a hard time crying,” she said. "It is just something I don’t do.”
The family didn’t speak of these moves for years, she would say. "They couldn’t help where they were living. It was the only thing they could do to stay alive."
The family settled in Boston in 1945 and soon learned much of their family in Europe had died, some in the war, others after. The family would move several times again as her father found jobs, and she and her sister began going to Jewish summer camps.
It was there, she said, that she "fell into the Zionist spirit. I loved the feeling that there would be a state of Israel."
She finally felt she had a community, she said.
"These were my people,"she said. "This group was very tight. I was very welcome there. It was a really important part of my life."
Her life, she said, was shaped by the war.
"It was an experience that affected everything we did," she said, lessons she and her husband, who died in 2010, passed to their three daughters.
In all the years of moving from place to place, she remembers they never went to sleep without saying a prayer for their family in Europe, to "bless Aunt Virgie, Emra and Oscar and Pearl ... our grandparents."
When she met some of this family again in the mid-1950s, "I knew them. They had been part of my everyday life. … They were part of my vocabulary."
At the end of telling her story, of two hours and 54 minutes of mostly emotionless factual testimony, the interviewer for the Shoah project asks if there was anything she hoped people could take away from her story.
"We need a broader picture of all of humanity," she said. "We need to educate ourselves and always need to be on top of what is going on in the world and be alert and be responsive to it."
And it's why she continues to tell their story, to warn about antisemitism − even as hate against Jews soars to historic levels.
Just last year, Steinmetz showed up to a Boulder City Council meeting in support of her local Jewish community.
A woman sat next to Steinmetz, she recounted in a video interview in June 2024. The woman had a Palestinian flag and a sign that read "From the river to the sea," a phrase that can be used to promote antisemitism.
Steimetz turned to her and said: "Do you realize that that means you want to kill me? You want me destroyed?'"
The woman just turned away.
"Jews in Boulder and maybe Denver, and probably in cities all around the world, are afraid of wearing their Jewish stars," Steinmetz said.
People are taking down their mezuzahs so no one will know it's a Jewish house, she said.
But in the next breath, Steinmetz rejected the notion that silence is ever an option.
"It is up to each of us to say something, to say something and do something. 'You can say no; I'm a human being just like that other person. We are all humans.'"
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Holocaust survivor burned in Boulder speaks after attack: 'We are better than this'
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