Berthe Badehi, who hid from the Nazis as a child during World War II, has become one of the many Holocaust survivors confined in their homes to evade the coronavirus.
This year, testimonials from survivors will be streamed online and featured in a pre-recorded ceremony to be broadcast in Israel by Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre, when Yom HaShoah begins on Monday evening. This week's scaled-back commemorations,"made us realise what the future might be like," Smith told AFP."Maybe it is an opportunity to say... we won't get 10,000 people at Auschwitz, but maybe we can get a million people online," he added, referring to the Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland.For survivors like Badehi, any comparison between COVID-19 isolation and Nazi-era confinement in ghettos and camps is inappropriate.
Dov Landau, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor, said it was"indecent" to make comparisons between the two eras. Beyond cancellation of educational events, COVID-19 has posed a particularly grave threat to Holocaust survivors, given their age.