The CU and broader publics are invited to a public testimony by Barbara Steinmetz, a survivor of the Holocaust and the recent antisemitic attack on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall. She will speak on Monday, April 20, 4:40–5:55 p.m. in person in Miramontes Baca Education Bldg 155 [2445 Kittredge Loop Road, CU campus]. This is a public program. The community is welcome. No tickets required. Public parking is available nearby.

Barbara Steinmetz (née Bandler) was born in 1936 as the second of two children to an orthodox Jewish family in Gyor, Hungary. Shortly after her birth, the family returned to the northern Adriatic town of Lussinpiccolo, (fascist) Italy, where Alexander Samuel and Margaret Charlotte Bandler, Barbara’s parents, had been running a popular hotel since the late 1920s. The family stayed in Italy until 1939, when the implementation of the Italian Racial Laws, including the loss of employment and right to property ownership, forced them to leave the country. They first went to Southern France and, in 1940, managed to reach Lisbon. They secured visas for the Dominican Republic, one of the very few countries to announce immigration opportunities at the 1939 Evian conference. Margaret Bandler’s chemistry degree, specializing in milk products, met Dominican officials’ interest in immigrants with agricultural expertise. The family left Europe by boat in May 1941, first sailing to New York and then onwards to the Dominican Republic. They settled in Sosúa, where the Dominican Republic Resettlement Association (DORSA) had established a new settlement. Barbara stayed in the Dominican Republic with her older sister and parents until June 1945. With the help of relatives in the US, they managed to get visas that enabled them to return and, this time, disembark in New York. Her parents got jobs and moved the family to Detroit, where Barbara and her sister started or continued school.

A long-term resident of Colorado, she was in a group of Jewish Coloradans, who highlighted the fate of the post-October 2023 hostages in Gaza, in a public event on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall last summer, when a man attacked them with firebombs. Many in the group, like Barbara, were severely burnt. One of them later passed away from the injuries she had sustained. 

The Program is supported by the Departments of Anthropology and History as well as the Program in Jewish Studies. For more information, please contact Profs. P. Shankman or T. Pegelow Kaplan at thomas.pegelow-kaplan@colorado.edu.