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The 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, burned during an attack by a man armed with a “make-up flamethrower,” sent a message to other parts of the United States on Tuesday. “We’re better than this.”
Barbara Steinz told NBC News, in her first public statements since the horrifying attack on a group of demonstrators claiming the return of Israeli hostages on Sunday, that what happened “has nothing to do with the Holocaust.”
Steinmetz said she and the other members of the group are running for their lives and are shown “peacefully” when they are suddenly attacked.
In a brief interview, Steinmetz still seemed rattled by the ordeal.
“It’s about what the heck is going on in our country,” Steinmetz said as he was pushed. “What the heck is going on?”
Asked if he wanted Americans to know after the attack, Steinmetz said, “I want people to be kind, decent, kind, respectful and envelop each other.”
“We are Americans,” she said. “We’re better than this. That’s what I want them to know. They’re kind and decent people.”
Born in Hungary, Steinmetz was one of dozens of people injured in the attacks that the 45-year-old Egyptian citizen allegedly named Mohamed Sabri Soliman.
Police said Soliman also threw Molotov cocktails to the demonstrators.
The attack came 11 days after two Israeli embassy workers were shot and killed outside the Washington capital Jewish Museum.
In both Boulder and Washington, authorities said the alleged attackers cried out “free Palestine.”
Rabbi Marc Soloway, leader of Boulder’s Boulder congregation, Steinmetz’s member, said the woman suffered minor burns but was physically “alright.”
Soloway said he wasn’t very sure how those who escaped the Holocaust would handle what happened on Pearl Street.
“Can you imagine the trauma it responds to?” Soloway said. “It’s just scary.”
Soloway said Steinmetz was injured while attending weekly walks.
In addition to Steinmetz, five other members of his congregation have been injured, and two remain hospitalized, Soloway said.
The rabbi said Soliman, who was charged with attempted murder and hate crimes, was “delusional and misguided” among other crimes.
“If he thinks that unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence will help the Palestinians suffering in Gaza, he is so misguided and very misguided,” the rabbi said.
As for Steinmetz, most of her childhood was spent on an island off the coast of Croatia. Croatia’s coastal island is part of Italy, and her parents ran the hotel, according to the CU Independer, a student newspaper at the University of Colorado Boulder, published an article about her in 2019 for Holocaust Memory Week.
“I lived an idyllic childhood on the banks of the Adriatic Sea,” Steinmetz recalled in the article.
However, after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stripped Italian Jews of citizenship in 1938, Steinmetz’s father took his family to Hungary, where he fled to France two years later.
When the Germans entered France, Steinmetz and her family were forced to flee again. This time I went to Portugal. There, thousands of other refugees were searching for ways to escape Europe.
Steinmetz said her father had applied for asylum in 12 countries, including the United States. But the Dominican Republic, only one person will take it.
They left for the doctor on a Portuguese freighter in 1941, and at a short stop in New York City, she was able to see the city’s famous skyline, she told the Independent.
Steinmetz was sent to a Catholic boarding school while they resettled in the coastal town of Sosua and their parents struggled with threatening jobs.
“For four years, the monastery was our home,” Steinmetz recalled in the article. “It’s formidable, but 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.
According to the article, Steinmetz moved to Boulder in the “mid 2000s.”
NBC News’ Corky Siemaszko and Morgan Chesky contributed.
At least eight people were injured on Sunday at a rally of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, after a man burned out using a makeshift burn device.
This story first appeared on nbcnews.com. More from NBC News:
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