This weekend’s demonstrations were the scene of comparisons between vaccination and the Holocaust. Besides being obnoxious, this comparison is nonsense.
During demonstrations against the health pass and the compulsory vaccination of caregivers, some demonstrators wore a yellow star. For them and them, the health pass is comparable to the exclusion of part of the population on anti-Semitic grounds. Others speak of health apartheid, comparing the impossibility for unvaccinated people to enter places open to the public to the racist regime set up in South Africa between 1948 and 1991, traces of which can still be seen today. hui. The comparison, however, has no form of coherence, neither logical nor historical.
As the blogger Laurent Sagalovitsch means very well on Slate, “wearing the yellow star was not so much the prohibition to enter a particular store, but the certainty of boarding sooner or later a train whose final destinations were called Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibór, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno… “. The health pass, which can be decried, bears no resemblance to a system aimed at deporting people to death. Refusing to be vaccinated and to use the health pass is not to side with the oppressed as explained on Instagram the Collages feministes juif.ve.s group in Marseille: “To be a victim is not to be an actor of what is happening. Choosing to wear a yellow star on your jacket is nonsense.”
“I wore the star myself. I know what it is”
Anger dominates over this absurd rhetoric. On Sunday July 18, 2021, Joseph Schwartz, survivor of the Vel d’Hiv Raid on July 16 and 17, 1942, spoke: “I have worn the star myself. I know what it is. I have it in my flesh, again. (…)” It is the duty of all. Of all our fellow citizens. stand up, not to let this outrageous wave pass. Anti-Semitic, racist “.
And to add: “I would like to say my indignation”. Holding up one of the posters used during these demonstrations, where we see the words “without vaccine” on a yellow star, he insisted: “This comparison is odious, you have to all stand up against this thing. You can’t imagine how touched I was. Tears came to me.”
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The yellow star, a passport to death
Another important figure in the fight against anti-Semitism, Arno Klarsfeld recalls for his part on France Info than “The yellow star was a passport that led to your death, while the vaccine saves lives.” He criticizes the lack of reactions from the organizers of the various gatherings: “We may not want to be vaccinated, but no need to appeal to the greatest tragedies that have struck our planet to justify our unwillingness to be vaccinated”, underlined Arno Klarsfeld. “What worries me is that nobody reacts, that those who organize the demonstrations do not react and that the security service does not fire these people.”