Psychological impact of the outbreak of COVID-19 on Holocaust survivors in France

Identified in late 2019 as originating from Wuhan, China, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has spread rapidly and globally. The health crisis that is linked to COVID-19 has been declared a public health emergency of international concern (Zhong et al., 2020) and was described by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, as being "the worst world crisis since the Second world war". In France, the first cases of COVID-19 were officially confirmed on January 24, 2020 (Bernard Stoecklin, Rolland, & Silue, 2020). In a televised address on March 16, 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron declared six times during a speech to the nation that “we are at war” against the virus. He used the following warrior rhetoric: “We fight neither against an army or against another nation, but the enemy is there, invisible, elusive and advancing” (Kauffmann, 2020). The overuse of the war metaphor when speaking about the coronavirus, as well as the measures of advising social distancing and self-isolation to decrease the spread of the coronavirus, are causing unknown levels of fear and suffering for older people who are more vulnerable to stress and anxiety (Yang et al., 2020, Johal, 2009). In contexts such as the COVID-19 health crisis, Holocaust survivors (HSs) are often more vulnerable to accumulative and/or new traumatic events, which may awaken or augment the reactions to a previously experienced traumatic event (Kimron & Cohen, 2012, Baider, Peretz, & Kaplan De-Nour, 1993, Christenson, Walker, Ross, & Maltbie, 1981, Yehuda et al., 1995). Several studies have reported considerable emotional distress that was experienced among HSs during Gulf War scud missile attacks in 1991 (Solomon & Prager, 1992), during the threat of terror in Israel (Zloof, Yaphe, Durst, Venuta, & Fusman, 2005) or after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, in the USA (Lamet & Dyer, 2004). For some HSs, home confinement and helplessness that are being experienced during the COVID-19 health crisis have resulted in the re-experiencing of wartime traumas that occurred more than 76 years ago. Few studies have examined the negative psychological impact of COVID-19 in HSs (Cohn-Schwartz et al., 2020; Shrira, Maytles, & Frenkel-Yosef, 2020, Maytles, Frenkel-Yosef, & Shrira, 2021) and offspring of HSs (Shrira & Felsen, 2021, Felsen,2021) in Israel and in the US. France has the fourth largest number of Holocaust survivors in the world (approximately 40,000 survivors are located in France), according to estimates from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). The COVID-19 health crisis provides a rare opportunity to examine how HSs in France may react to a second traumatic event that exhibits some similarities with the original trauma, especially in regard to the situation of the lockdown combined with the fear of death for either the HS or for the members of their family.