Holocaust survivor getting COVID-19 vaccine: ‘I’ve been through way worse’

Mira Rosenblatt, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she was not concerned about receiving her second coronavirus vaccination, noting that she had “been through way worse.”

Sylvie Jean Baptiste, a nursing graduate student who checks on patients following their vaccines, said Rosenblatt told her, “I am not nervous. I’ve been through way worse,’ ” according to The New York Times.

“Then she started telling her story,” Baptiste added.

Rosenblatt and her family were forced into a ghetto in Poland in 1939, when she was 15 years old, the Times noted, adding that she was sent to a labor camp three years later and in 1945 escaped from a Nazi death march in the dead of winter into a nearby forest.

Rosenblatt reportedly lived on worms for days before taking refuge on a farm, but fearing discovery, fled back to the woods before hiding among a group of dairy farmers. 

She worked with the farms for the remainder of the war, according to the Times, which added that she reunited with an old acquaintance, Henry Rosenblatt, himself an Auschwitz survivor, and the two married and immigrated to America. She published a memoir, “Strength,” in 2020.

Mira Rosenblatt received her second shot in early February, climbing a 4-foot-high snowbank to reach her granddaughter’s car.

“It wasn’t busy, but it was a good steady flow,” Kristine Ortiz, who oversaw the vaccination process, told the Times. Ortiz took notice of the 97-year-old and was one of three nurses to whom the she told her story.

“When you have someone who has survived something like this, you can’t help but stand still,” Ortiz said. “There were definitely tears. I had to ask someone to take over for me for a few minutes afterward because I felt shaky from the story.”