Barbara Steinmetz was born in Hungary on November 26, 1936. Her parents ran a hotel on Lošinj, now Croatia, which at the time belonged to Italy. Two years after Barbara was born, Benito Mussolini began the persecution of Jews, including the Steinmetzes. In 1940, Barbara's father decided he had had enough and took the family back to Hungary, where they desperately tried to convince the other family members to leave the country.
The pessimists will be saved, the optimists will be killed.
Steinmetz, her sister and her parents left Hungary, settling in Nice. Then France was also invaded by the Germans and the Steinmetz family fled again by train to Barcelona, then Madrid and Lisbon, in Portugal, where the philosopher Walter Benjamin never arrived, having taken his own life to avoid falling into the hands of the Nazis.
Of the 32 countries that sent representatives to the Evian Conference, where they were to decide what to do with Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, only one agreed to take them in: the Dominican Republic, then ruled by dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Stranded in Lisbon, penniless, Barbara’s father asked the governments of Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, Iceland, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Ghana, Kenya, Cuba, the United States and South Africa for asylum. They all said no (remember that Israel did not yet exist). He managed to book a place on the Portuguese merchant ship S.S. Nyassa, bound for the Dominican Republic.
The ship docked at Ellis Island on July 13, 1941. And from there to the Dominican town of Sosua. Barbara’s parents sent their daughters to a Catholic boarding school. The school’s Mother Superior was the only one who knew their identities. Some descendants still live there. The Steinmetz family was able to reach the United States with the help of a Hungarian immigrant who had settled in Boston.
Steinmetz moved to Boulder, Colorado, in the mid-2000s, a Colorado town known for its outdoor activities. The 88-year-old Holocaust survivor was burned in an attack on Shavuot by an Egyptian with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Steinmetz and other members of the “Run for Their Lives” group were demonstrating for Hamas hostages on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot when they were attacked by Mohamed Sabry Soliman with homemade flamethrowers.
He said he wanted to “kill them all,” the “Zionists”.
So a Jew who escaped the mass burning of Jews in Nazi Europe falls victim to a new kind of Jewish burning in 21st-century America. When the Steinmetz family fled Nazi persecution, people in Europe shouted, “Jews, go to Palestine”. Today, the same kind of people shout, “Jews, get out of Palestine”. And not two-state Palestine, but Palestine from the sea to the river, as a terrorist invasion becomes a noble revolt and a Hamas-run enclave is transformed into a reenactment of the Holocaust.
Alvin Rosenfeld, one of the greatest scholars of antisemitism, called it “Auschwitz nostalgia”.