The granddaughter of a sculptor whose war monument was defaced by anti-Israel protesters in Central Park says the criminals are “idiots’’ and that her beloved kin “would be very, very sad.
“Good God. Unbelievable. What a time we’re living in,’’ Faith Runner, 76, told The Post on Tuesday when learning of the graffiti and anti-Israel stickers plastered on late grandfather Karl Illava’s historic World War I tribute to American heroes.
“Idiots,’’ said the Massachusetts woman, who lived in New York City in the late 1960s.
“It’s really ironic, too, because these guys, these American boys who gave their lives and blood, were fighting for people’s freedom,’’ Runner said of the US soldiers to whom the statue is dedicated.
“And here you have these hooligans here who just don’t understand history, they probably just don’t understand what they’re doing.
“I’m very sad,’’ she added. “I think [Illava] would feel the same. I think he’d be saddened that people can be so misguided and so destructive of things that are not about them and not about their political beliefs.
“He wouldn’t be enraged,’’ she said. “He was too kind a man. But he would be very, very sad, I think, and he’d probably feel sorry for the people who did it.’’
Illava’s large bronzed statue features seven soldiers, including one clutching a collapsed comrade.
It was placed near the park’s East 67th Street entrance and the armory for the Seventh Regiment, whose infantry “helped to break Germany’s Hindenburg Line of defense at the conclusion of World War I,’’ in 1927, according to a park website.
The vandals — part of a mob frustrated that it couldn’t disrupt the nearby Met Gala on the Upper East Side on Monday night — desecrated the monument by spray-painting “Gaza’’ in large letters in blood-red and black and putting anti-Israel stickers on its base.
One America hater burned a US flag at its base, while some protesters climbed on top of the statue’s soldiers and draped Palestinian flags over them.
They did the same to a statue of Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman nearby.
Runner said her grandfather, who had been in the calvary with the Seventh Regiment, was grateful to have been hired by the city to do the touching World War I sculpture, given it was during the Great Depression.
“He was very lucky to get these commissions because most artists were starving,’’ she said of her grandfather.
She said she last visited the monument with a friend in the fall.
“It was a lovely time,’’ Runner said.
She said her grandfather intentionally made the monument what some might call “ugly’’ — but that was on purpose.
“He hated war,’’ she said.
Cops are still hunting for the vandals — with Mayor Eric Adams putting up $5,000 of his own money as part of a reward to help track down the culprits.
