Paris. A French Holocaust survivor criticized the anti-vaccine protesters comparing themselves to the Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany during World War II. French officials and anti-racist groups also expressed outrage.
When more than 100,000 people marched in France on Saturday against new vaccination rules enacted by the government, some protesters wore yellow stars like the one the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Others held posters evoking the Auschwitz death camp or South Africa’s apartheid regime, claiming that the French government mistreats them with its anti-pandemic measures.
“You can’t imagine how much it has bothered me. This comparison is abhorrent. We must rise up against this ignominy, ”said 94-year-old Joseph Szwarc on Sunday during a ceremony to commemorate the victims of anti-Semitic and racist acts by the French state, which collaborated with the Adolf Hitler regime.
“I wore the star, I know what it means, I still have it on my skin,” said Szwarc, who was deported from France by the Nazis, with tears in his eyes. “Our duty is to prevent this anti-Semitic and racist wave from passing over us. ”.
Historian and former Nazi seeker Serge Klarsfeld also criticized the analogy, noting that “the yellow star was a symbol of death that excluded Jews from society and marked them for extermination, while vaccines instead save lives. ”. Equating the two, he told The Associated Press, is a “loathsome” comparison that serves to trivialize the yellow star.
French government spokesman Gabriel Attal lamented the “abject comparisons” of vaccination rules with Nazi atrocities, and urged other political leaders to speak out.
Later, Attal emphasized the importance of vaccination despite some increasingly radical pockets of resistance.
“We are in a fourth wave,” he said, after a cabinet meeting held on Monday, a day before a bill that makes the vaccination pass mandatory to access public spaces is presented in Parliament. The law will take effect on Wednesday for cultural and recreational venues, and in early August for restaurants, bars and other venues.
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