Italian Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre
appeals to “anti-vaxxers”

While all across the world millions plan to skip Covid-19 vaccine, even though infections climb dramatically, Italian Holocaust survivor and senator for life Liliana Segre launched a touching appeal to vaccination. In what she called a “secular prayer” to anti-vaxxers, which last week generated a large amount of attention in Italy, senator Segre stressed that the choice of getting inoculated or not must not be an ideological issue, but exclusively a health-related one.
“We must decide who we want to trust and, although it seems understood, I get that for someone this might not be so easy. Everyone finds himself alone in front of his own conscience”, read the plea. “So, I can tell you what I’ll do: I’ll get vaccinated as soon as possible. And I say more: it is a choice that I would have made at any moment of my long life”, wrote the senator, who recently turned 90.
“I have always had vaccines, those considered useful and indispensable, and now I think that getting vaccinated against Covid-19 is a choice that should be spontaneous and natural, for your own good. And above all for the good of others, of all humanity”, she added. “So, I am convinced, the year ahead will be of great hope. We all need it”, she concluded launching a message full of positivity.

The memory of the past resonated deeply, in Liliana Segre’s appeal. “In front of a visible, declared, palpable and clear-cut enemy, everyone tries to behave as best they can: you can fight hard, you can be indifferent by waiting for it to pass, or you can adapt by making compromises”, she wrote. “But faced with an invisible enemy like this, whose only goal is its own survival and therefore the total conquest of individuals and ultimately their destruction and that of Humanity, there are no alternatives: we must fight it. And at the moment the only real weapon we have at our disposal are vaccines. Therefore, the choice becomes clear: either get vaccinated, that is, fight, or not get vaccinated”.
Liliana Segre also expressed solidarity to Claudia Alivernini, the young nurse at the hospital Spallanzani in Rome, who was the first in Italy to get the vaccine and for that became the target of a hate campaign. “I know what it feels like when, although completely innocent, one is attacked for the sole fault of existing”, writes Segre, who on December also signed a parliamentary question asking for a national vaccination plan aimed at protecting both prison workers and inmates.