“The Jews in Boulder and perhaps Denver, and perhaps cities around the world, are afraid to wear their Jewish stars.”
Victims of Honorary Attack in the Boulder Community Criticize Anti-Semitism
The Boulder Jewish Community Center hosted an overnight vigil for community members to assist victims of fire bomb attacks.
Barbara Steinmetz survived the Holocaust as a child, fled from one country to the next after Jewish families were stripped of their citizenship.
They left Italy for Hungary, then France and finally Portugal, before finding a non-European shelter in the Dominican Republic. The first five years of her life with her sister Margaret and her parents were nothing more than they could carry.
One thing that remained constant was that their family was together.
That is a message that resonates with her almost 90 years later, and why was she marching in Boulder on Sunday? She was part of a small group that turned their attention to the Jewish hostages Hamas had to take them home when she was attacked. The man threw a Molotov cocktail into the group, causing 12 people to be injured.
Steinmetz, 88, told NBC News earlier this week that she and other members of the group are running for their lives, peacefully demonstrated when they were attacked.
“We’re Americans. We’re better than this,” she told the news outlet. They must be “kind and decent people.”
Steinmetz spent most of her life not talking about what her family endured. Her father’s message to her was always to move forward.
In 1998, she sat down and shared a story with the University of Southern California Shore Project, documenting the lives of Holocaust survivors. In an almost three-hour interview, Steinmetz talked about her family’s escape, her relatives who died in the war, and the lessons they learned.
She was 61 when she interviewed Shore.
“Family is the most important thing,” Steinmetz said.
She was too young to remember much from her family who left Italy in 1938. What she remembers was the atmosphere of trauma that she said in the interview.
After leaving Hungary, her father, who ran a hotel on the coast of northern Italy, visited the embassy and wrote letters to various countries to try and move their families as Hitler’s power grew. Each time, their movements were temporary. Each time they only brought things that they could carry. But each time they were together.
“Things don’t matter, people don’t matter. The only thing that matters is what you have in your brain and in your mind,” she said. “And it’s completely transportable.”
Over the past few years, Steinmetz has spoken about his family at Holocaust memory events and classrooms, libraries and churches. She wants people to understand history in order to understand that Jews are being targeted again.
“Hitler basically took (hitler) life and took his dreams away… for the rest of his life he was chasing, running, and trying to make a living,” she said.
The family eventually settled in Sosua, where the Dominican Republic Resettlement Association (DORSA) established a refugee camp for the Jews. Her family said life was difficult there and she had to learn to build homes, farm rocky terrain and raise a family.
Steinmetz and her sister, three years older, were immediately sent to Catholic school. There they knew they were Jews. The nun had her change clothes for the baby Jesus figurine in the church. And for a few minutes each day, it felt like she had a doll.
She remembers sleeping next to her sister and crying properly.
“I never cry again. Years, years, years later, when something happened, my mother and father died and cried. To this day, I have a hard time crying,” she said. “That’s something I don’t do.”
She would say the family didn’t talk about these moves in years. “They couldn’t help where they lived. That was the only thing they could do to keep them alive.”
The family settled in Boston in 1945 and soon learned that many of the European families had passed away. As her father found a different job, the family moved several times again, and she and her sister began going to Jewish summer camps.
She “falls into the Zionist spirit. I feel that there will be an Israeli state,” she said.
She finally felt like 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 was shaped by war, she said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSFA5F-voz8
“It was an experience that affected everything we did,” she said. She and her husband, who passed away in 2010, gave it to their three daughters.
In every year of moving from place to place, she remembers not falling asleep without praying for her European family.
When she met some of this family again in the mid-1950s, she said, “I knew them. They were part of my daily life… They were part of my vocabulary.”
Finally telling her story, for 2 hours and 54 minutes of almost emotionless factual testimony, the Shoah Project interviewer asks if people want to be able to take away her story.
“We need a wider picture of all humanity,” she said. “We need to educate ourselves, we need to be constantly aware, be vigilant and respond to what’s happening in the world.”
And that’s why she continues to tell their stories and warns of anti-Semitism – despite the rise of hatred towards Jews to a historical level.
Last year, Steinmetz appeared at a meeting of the Boulder City Council, supporting the local Jewish community.
The woman sat next to Steinmetz and spoke in a June 2024 video interview. The woman had a Palestinian flag and a sign that read “From the river to the sea.”
Steimetz turned to her and said, “Does that mean you want to kill me? Do you want to destroy me?” ”
The woman just turned away.
“The Jews in Boulder and perhaps Denver, and perhaps cities around the world, are afraid to wear their Jewish stars,” Steinmetz said.
People are defeating them Mezuza She said, so that no one knows that it is a Jewish home.
However, in the next breath, Steinmetz rejected the notion that silence is an unprecedented option.
“It’s up to each of us to say something, say something, do something. “You can say no. I’m like other people. We’re all human.”
