ROME (AP) – An Italian Holocaust survivor’s attempt to encourage other older adults to receive the anti-COVID-19 vaccine sparked a wave of anti-Semitic comments and other injuries on social media.
Liliana Segre, 90, received the first of a series of two vaccines in Milan on Thursday. She urged people who reach their age “not to be afraid and get the vaccine”.
“I’m not afraid of the vaccine, I’m afraid of the disease,” said Segre.
After Segre’s comments received negative attention from social media, Italian Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese expressed solidarity with her and denounced the “new and unacceptable attack” that, he said, was marked by “a very dangerous mixture of hatred , violence and racism ”.
Segre publicly stripped a shoulder to receive his vaccine injection at a hospital on the first day Milan began administering the vaccines to residents aged 80 and over. She said she believes those who refuse to be vaccinated are “too scared or not informed enough”.
“So, as a 90-year-old grandmother, I tell my ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ who reach that age not to be afraid and get the vaccine,” she said.
Segre holds one of Italy’s greatest honors. In 2018, President Sergio Mattarella appointed her a lifetime senator in honor of her years of talking about the Holocaust with Italian children in classrooms across the country.
When German troops occupied Italy during World War II, many of the members of the tiny Italian Jewish minority were arrested in Rome and elsewhere for deportation.
Segre was one of the few Italian children to survive deportation to a Nazi death camp. She and her family went into hiding after the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime introduced anti-Jewish laws, but they were arrested in 1943 and placed on trains leaving Milan for the Nazi-run camps.
The 1938 racist laws targeting Jews were abolished with Mussolini’s death in 1945.
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This version has been corrected to show that Segre’s first name is Liliana, not Lilian.