Holocaust survivor burned in Colorado terror attack speaks out: ‘What the hell is going on in our country?’
An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was set on fire by Colorado terror suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman has one sobering question after the heinous antisemitic attack: “What the hell is going on in our country?”
Barbara Steinmetz was the eldest of the 12 victims who were wounded when they were firebombed while advocating for the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
She said the terror has left her asking, “What the hell is going on?”
“We’re better than this,” she told NBC News.
Steinmetz added that she “wants people to be nice and decent to each other, kind, respectful [and] encompassing.”
“That’s what I want them to know. That they be kind and decent human beings,” she said.
Rabbi Marc Soloway, who leads Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, where Steinmetz is a member, said she suffered minor burns but should fully recover.
The faith leader wondered how someone who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were slaughtered, could comprehend the hate Steinmetz experienced on Pearl Street 80 years after the end of World War II.
“Can you imagine the trauma that that reactivates?” Soloway said. “It’s just horrendous.”
Steinmetz and others among the mostly elderly demonstrators were attacked allegedly by Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman while they were peacefully partaking in a weekly “Run for their Lives” walk to show solidarity with the 58 Israeli hostages still in Hamas’ hands.
The suspected terrorist, who had illegally overstayed his visa, shouted “Free Palestine” and other antisemitic slogans as he blasted the group with a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, even setting himself on fire.
Soloway said he believes Soliman is “deluded and misguided” for believing “that an act of unspeakable brutality and violence is going to help the … suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
Soliman has been accused of attempted murder and committing a hate crime, among other charges.
Stay up to date on the Boulder, Colorado, terror attack
- Boulder terror suspect planned mass shooting but was stopped from buying gun due to immigration status
- Daughter of suspected Colorado terrorist said ‘USA has fundamentally changed me’ — and revealed why family moved here — weeks before firebombing
- Colorado terror suspect accidentally set himself on fire at start of attack, stunning new video shows
- Holocaust survivor burned in Colorado terror attack speaks out: ‘What the hell is going on in our country?’
- Colorado terror suspect ranted ‘God is greater’ than US in video before antisemitic firebomb attack
Steinmetz was born in Hungary in 2936, but spent her childhood on an island off the coast of Croatia in the Adriatic Sea where her parents ran a hotel, she told the Colorado University Independent, the school’s student newspaper, in 2019.
The island, Lussinpiccol, was owned by Italy at the time.
Once Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared Jews were no longer citizens in 1938, her family fled back to Hungary and then France two years later.
After the German invasion of France, they were forced to run again to Portugal, where her father applied for asylum in a dozen countries, including the US. Only the Dominican Republic would take them.
Steinmetz and her family lived there for four years until the end of the war when they were able to move to the US. She moved to Boulder sometime in the mid-2000s.
