Holocaust Survivor Sees Parallels Between Nazi Germany and Approach to COVID Pandemic

Holocaust Survivor Sees Parallels Between Nazi Germany and Approach to COVID Pandemic
A man shows his COVID-19 "Super Green Pass" before getting on a train on the day Italy brings in tougher rules for the unvaccinated, at Termini main train station in Rome, Italy, on Jan. 10, 2022. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters)
Lia Onely
2/13/2023
Updated:
2/17/2023
0:00

Holocaust survivor, Vera Sharav, directed a documentary series drawing parallels between what happened under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and the recent policies under COVID-19.

Sharav’s first film, “Never Again is Now Global,” was launched on Jan. 30. It is a five-part series of interviews with holocaust survivors as well as children and grandchildren of survivors and German people drawing on their grandparents’ stories.

“It didn’t begin as a series,” Sharav told The Epoch Times. “I felt that what I was feeling, and seeing, and observing was too reminiscent of what I call the ‘prelude to the Holocaust.’”

So she decided to see if there were other survivors who were observing what she was observing.

“It turned out to be a five-and-a-half-hour series because what the people were saying had to be documented,” Sharav said.

This was not done as a commercial venture. “This was done really as a lesson.”

Sharav said she had no script and no preconceived objective. “I wanted to see where it would go.”

The people who participated in the documentary did so because they just wanted to talk, she said. “They had a very heavy heart, and they wanted to tell what they know, and how they’re viewing all this.”

‘I Was Right Not to Obey’

Sharav was born in Romania in April 1937. In 1941 her family was deported and herded into a concentration camp in Ukraine. Sharav’s father died there before she was five of typhus, which was raging in all the ghettos and concentration camps at the time.

That concentration camp was not a death camp but a transit camp where they were left to starve. But the fear of being put on a list to be sent to a death camp was always hovering over everyone. “So it was a constant state of fear, of course cold, and starvation,” Sharav said at the beginning of the first episode.

Sharav’s mother learned that there was going to be a rescue of some orphan children. So she lied and put Sharav on an orphan list to save her life.

Sharav left on a cattle train where she befriended a family. When they got to the harbor city, there were three small boats waiting to take them. They had lists assigning people, each one to their assigned boat.

Sharav was assigned to the boat with the orphaned children, but she refused and would not budge. Everybody boarded and Sharav was left alone. Eventually, she was able to get on the boat with the family that she had wanted to be with.

During the night, a submarine torpedoed the boat carrying the orphaned children. None of them survived.

“I was right not to obey,” Sharav said in the film. “That’s a lesson that I think has kind of made who I am.”

She arrived in the United States in January 1948.

Parallels to the COVID Policies

The policies enacted against COVID-19 were “the most audacious crime against humanity” said Sharav to The Epoch Times, and this time they weren’t targeting just one group. Jews were not the focus but “the paradigm is the same. It’s just that it’s global.”
Vera Sharav in New York City in 2022. (Courtesy of Vera Sharav)
Vera Sharav in New York City in 2022. (Courtesy of Vera Sharav)

People were being told one thing after the other which was very harmful both in terms of “psychological health and biological health,” she said.

The lockdowns and the isolation were the worst things according to Sharav. Government restrictions were heavy handed, not allowing people to enter public places including restaurants and concerts.

People needed to show a green passport, which had the effect of separating those who would obey and were rewarded, from the people who chose not to listen to government but to their own reasoning, said Sharav.

In that situation “people start rationalizing ‘well, it’s not so bad,’” she said. “‘We could shop in a different shop. We don’t have to go to the major market. We don’t have to go to the movie. The children don’t have to go to these schools,’ and it goes on and on.”

During the lockdowns in various places there were people who called the police to tell on their neighbor when people weren’t allowed to go out after curfew, Sharav said. “What does that remind one of?”

As for masking mandates there’s never been any science or any health model to show that masks protect anyone from a virus, said Sharav.

“They are a symbol of shame and slavery,” she said. Slaves had to wear masks. Not these masks, but masks. It is a symbol, “the equivalent symbol of the yellow star.”

Some people are offended that Sharav would compare the holocaust to COVID-19 policies.

“I am not being radical,” she said. “This comes from very deep pain, to see that that is what has happened in these 80 years or so.”

“One of the issues is that most people, including Jews, including Israelis, do not really know the history,” Sharav said. And the history is that Hitler took over control in January 1933. The ‘final solution’ didn’t begin until 1942.”

In between, there were many phases that strangled Jews—first, into ghettos, and then all their assets were removed, Sharav said.

Only in 1938 did the borders close, which trapped the Jews. Until then, they had time to leave Europe. But they didn’t.

The tragedy was also that the Jewish leadership mislead people and told them “just obey, everything will be alright, this will be over,” said Sharav.

“That’s how they got trapped.”

All these COVID-19 measures “really reminded me of some very ominous signs,” she said.

Now the technology is far more advanced, “Nazis could only dream of the kind of digital IDs that governments now have,” said Sharav. “If people agree to become an ID [number] instead of their identity. That’s it. That is the worst weapon.”

It comes straight out from the tattoo number. “Those tattoos were IBM identification numbers. Now, do most people know that?” she asked.

Edwin Black, one interviewee in the documentary, is the author of “IBM and the Holocaust” published in 2001. He argued that the numbers the Nazi’s tattooed on prisoners began as five-digit IBM Hollerith numbers.

Hollerith tabulators were machines that sorted data on punch cards and were used to identify and track Jewish residents of the country.

In a 2001 statement, the company acknowledged the use of its equipment by the Nazis: “IBM and its employees around the world find the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime abhorrent and categorically condemn any actions which aided their unspeakable acts.

“It has been known for decades that the Nazis used Hollerith equipment and that IBM’s German subsidiary during the 1930s—Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag)—supplied Hollerith equipment. … Dehomag came under the control of Nazi authorities prior to and during World War II.”

‘Propaganda Feeds the Fear’

In the second episode of her documentary series, Sharav tells about the loss of her son, Amichai, who died of a reaction to a prescribed drug.

“Well, you know, the personal tragedy of that I can’t really talk about that. But what I can talk about is what it taught me,” she said.

The drug that killed him was marketed as “the magic bullet” to cure his condition.

His death led Sharav into the advocacy work she has been doing for decades.

Sharav founded the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), which has a mission to “ensure that the moral right of voluntary medical decision-making is upheld.”

The organization also endeavors to actively counter “widely disseminated false claims that exaggerate the benefits of medical interventions, while minimizing risks,” according to the AHRP’s website.

The heavy handedness of the government’s COVID-19 policies dictating suddenly how to live your life and the barrage of the single narrative “didn’t ring right,” Sharav said in the film.

As time went on, it became apparent to her that people were “sort of pushed as a herd.”

“Those who are responsible for the pandemic have used two of the weapons that the Nazis used, which was fear and propaganda,” she said, adding, “propaganda feeds the fear.”

In the Nazi regime, “the fear was against Jews who were accused of being spreaders of infectious disease.”

The government in the time of the Nazis had totally taken over medicine and “they were the ones that drew up the protocols for the genocide,” Sharav said in the film.

In March and April of 2020 governments all over Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia issued directives that included lockdown and isolation policies and the forced usage of masks. These policies were followed by mandated vaccination in many places the following year.

Long before COVID-19, Sharav saw the connection with “the so-called umbrella of public health.”

Private doctors are not allowed to treat patients according to their professional judgment, using fully licensed FDA medicines, said Sharav.

“Why are they only allowed to use what is government dictated?” she asked. “What kind of superior authority or knowledge do government bureaucrats have over real scientists, real doctors, who abide by the Hippocratic oath which is to first do no harm to the individual?”

Public health is not about the individual, said Sharav.

The major problem is that when the individual is no longer regarded as the most important consideration “moral standards go by the wayside, and that’s what we’re witnessing.”

Sharav dedicated the documentary series to Vladimir Zelenko, a Jewish doctor from New York. He was a third generation relative of a holocaust survivor, who has since passed away.

Zelenko said in the movie that he saw early on in the COVID-19 pandemic that any doctor who spoke against the government narrative was immediately deplatformed, adding that the only thing that was relevant was the “narrative that the government wanted you to know.”

“Anything that gave people hope, whether it was hydroxychloroquine, or later Ivermectin, or even just a simple concept of early treatment, which is common sense, was marginalized, vilified,” he said.

Never Again is Now Global movie series. (Courtesy of Vera Sharav)
Never Again is Now Global movie series. (Courtesy of Vera Sharav)

‘Holocaust Is Used Like a Club’

Andrew Bridgen, who was a Conservative Member of Parliament in the UK, was suspended from his Party earlier this year after he posted a tweet comparing COVID-19 policies to the Holocaust.

“As one consultant cardiologist said to me this is the biggest crime against humanity since the holocaust,” he posted on Twitter in a since-deleted tweet.

“I agree completely with him,” said Sharav.

And the ones who removed him from the conservative party “were using the Holocaust to discredit him,” she said.

What they really threw him out for was a speech that he delivered earlier that outlined the scientific evidence about the excess deaths the injections were doing to the UK population, according to Sharav.

“They didn’t want a Member of Parliament to be able just to tell the truth,” she said, so they used the Holocaust as a way to defame him.

“The Holocaust is used like a club to bash people,” which is outrageous said Sharav.

It’s come about “because those who consider themselves to be the gatekeepers of the Holocaust, decide what you’re allowed to say and what you’re not allowed to say,” she said.

On Jan. 30, twenty-five Jewish scientists, doctors, and researchers from Israel, the UK, Canada, and the United States sent a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in protest of Bridgen’s suspension.

“Weaponization of the important issue of antisemitism for these purposes is particularly objectionable and disrespectful towards its victims,” the authors wrote.

The letter said the UK parliament “seized upon the opportunity to raise the issue of antisemitism in order to limit the free speech of those who raise legitimate concerns about the efficacy and safety of these COVID vaccines” and their mandating or coercion, “which breached many well-established ethical norms.”

The authors asked Sunak to withdraw the accusations of antisemitism leveled at Bridgen.

‘What Makes Us Civilized’

Sharav said she hopes that people today would draw on their experience and their intuition and not delegate their choices to government authorities.

Adults have responsibility, and people are allowed to make choices, she said. “This is God given, not government given,” and we can choose to do good or evil and we can choose to be responsible or to delegate our lives to whatever the experts say, said Sharav.

“You have to go by human values and moral principles. That’s what holds the society together. That’s what makes us civilized,” she said.

“The Nazis obliterated all moral values.”

The Nazis and Stalin denigrated parents because they wanted the children to look up to the authorities according to Sharav, either the Komsomol—the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League in the Soviet Union—or the Nazi youth league.

“But the family unit is the most important,” she said. “That is basic.”

Parents look after their children. The state never takes care of them.

“If people use their God-given brain to put the dots together, they stop obeying, said Sharav. “They realize this is against their interest and against their family.”

The Nazi system said Sharav was to relegate “some people to be worthy and other people to be unworthy.”

In Europe, they were called Jews, and now they are called the unvaccinated, Sharav said. “This is the most dangerous poisonous virus that continues to infect.”

And none of this is going to go away unless we all resist. “That’s the message—the importance of resistance,” Sharav said.

“Just resist, resist with all your might. Because if you don’t, there will be a time very quickly where you won’t be able to.”