<ul class="summary-list"><li>Anti-vaccine activists are comparing the <keyword id="12243915" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="holocaust" source="Orion">Holocaust</keyword> to COVID-19 vaccine mandates and pandemic restrictions.</li><li>Holocaust survivors say they want the "trivialization" of the their suffering to stop.</li></ul>Just days before <a href="https://www.insider.com/zoom-bomb-holocaust-remembrance-day-call-anti-semitic-swastika-2020-4">Holocaust Remembrance Day</a>, which is on Thursday, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/25/robert-f-kennedy-jr-vaccine-anne-frank">Robert F Kennedy Jr. told</a> a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/defeat-mandates-dc-rally-get-out-of-hand-organizers-warn-2022-1">Washington, DC rally</a> that Anne Frank had it easier than those living under the US's COVID-19 restrictions."Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland," Kennedy, who has <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-health-pseudoscience/anti-vaccine-propaganda-robert-f-kennedy-jr">spoken out against life-saving vaccinations for years,</a> said on Sunday. "You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did."Frank's poignant diary documented the teenager's thoughts and fears and she hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic before she later died in a Nazi concentration camp.With his comment on the most widely read book of Holocaust literature, Kennedy drew widespread criticism — even from his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines.<blockquote class="twitter-tweet blockquote" data-lang="en" data-cards="" data-conversation="">—Cheryl Hines (@CherylHines) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1486002123280199684?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 25, 2022</a></blockquote>On Sunday, the Defeat the Mandates rally also saw <a href="https://twitter.com/MrOlmos/status/1485309357508202506?s=20">protesters</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MrOlmos/status/1485336321501675521?s=20">donning yellow stars</a> — forcibly worn by Jews during the Holocaust to identify them to the Nazis. It is just one example of the torrent of Holocaust imagery being debased by anti-vaccination campaigners and lockdown skeptics.Days before that, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-compares-vaccine-mandates-to-nazi-medical-experiments-2022-1">Tucker Carlson</a> likened vaccine mandates to Nazi medical experiments on human subjects in Hitler's concentration camps. The Fox News host followed <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gop-rep-davidson-compares-vaccine-mandates-holocaust-n1287382">Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio</a>, who compared COVID-19 public health measures to the Holocaust.These examples are from the past couple of weeks alone. The list is not exhaustive but demonstrates how frequently the opponents of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic have constructed a false equivalence to Nazi persecution and genocide.And Holocaust survivors, speaking to Insider, said they are desperate for these sinister comparisons to stop.<h2>'It's extremely disturbing to those of us who survived'</h2><h2><div type="image" title="Joan Salter Holocaust survivor" height="1120" width="1494" msid="89142673" hostid="261"></div></h2>Joan Salter, a <keyword id="12347214" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="holocaust-survivor" source="Orion">Holocaust survivor</keyword> who lives in London, told Insider that the "complete lack of understanding" of those comparing the atrocities of the genocide to COVID-19 disturbs and upsets her."These people may well have heard of the Holocaust but clearly have absolutely no idea of what the suffering of the victims entailed," she said. Salter was born in February 1940 in Belgium, three months before the Nazis invaded the country, and moved to France as a baby. She narrowly avoided deportation to a concentration camp in 1942, when French Resistance fighters snuck her out of Paris in a laundry van under cover of darkness.Her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins did not survive and were among the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.As a survivor, Salter said, seeing anti-vaccine activists wearing concentration camp uniforms and yellow stars makes her "blood boil."Yellow stars, or Judenstern, are frequently worn by militant unvaccinated Americans to falsely equate themselves with the Jews of Europe who were slaughtered by Hitler's Third Reich. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet blockquote" data-lang="en" data-cards="" data-conversation="">—Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1485336321501675521">January 23, 2022</a></blockquote>"It is not just an insult to the memory of the six million dead but is extremely disturbing to those of us who survived," Salter said.<h2>'How dare people make comparisons'</h2>Estelle Nadel, an 87-year-old survivor who lives in Colorado, clearly remembers being forced to wear a yellow star during her youth in Nazi-occupied Poland.Seeing the resurgence of this anti-Jewish symbol at political protests, she told Insider, is "very frightening" to her and makes her worried about how people are denigrating her suffering.<div type="image" title="Estelle Nadel" height="369" width="492" msid="89142676" hostid="261"></div>The Nazis murdered Nadel's father, sister, and mother. Only she and her brother survived.Those appropriating traumatic imagery for political reasons "really, really don't understand" what happened, she said, and Nadel wants those doing it to learn more and appropriate less."How dare people make comparisons between the Holocaust and the pandemic," she said.<h2>'You have to understand that we are still here'</h2>"Seeing the Holocaust being trivialized and denied fills me with anger," said Gabriella Karin, a Holocaust survivor from Slovakia who now works as a sculptor."You have to understand that we are still here," she told Insider.<div type="image" title="Gabriella Karin" height="450" width="600" msid="89142678" hostid="261"></div>Karin spent nine months as a teenager hiding in a tiny apartment with her family during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, every day fearing that they would be killed.Now, living in Los Angeles, she said she finds it "extremely, extremely disturbing" that lawmakers, anti-vaccine activists, and TV personalities are so often comparing the Holocaust to COVID-19 vaccine mandates. "These people do not have an understanding of what actually happened during the Holocaust," she said.<blockquote class="twitter-tweet blockquote" data-lang="en" data-cards="" data-conversation="">—Dennis Kosuth (@Dennis_Kosuth) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1256309653455003648">May 1, 2020</a></blockquote><h2>60m online engagements linked the Holocaust and the pandemic </h2>It's "highly offensive, lazy and inaccurate" to try and equate central elements of the Holocaust to the pandemic, said Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the UK's Holocaust Educational Trust, in a statement to Insider. "Jews were marked out, rounded up to ghettos, and sent to their deaths in purpose-built extermination centers," Pollock continued. "There is no comparison to be made."Other comparisons include D<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fauci-lara-logan-nazi-fox-news-b1969146.html">r. Anthony Fauci being likened to Josef Mengele,</a> a doctor who conducted savage experiments on Auschwitz inmates, and infamous <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/02/auschwitz-memorial-condemns-nazi-slogan-illinois-coronavirus-rally">Nazi slogans being waved at rallies.</a>These comparisons, loaded with shock value, are becoming increasingly mainstream, according to the <a href="https://combatantisemitism.org/">Combat Antisemitism Movement</a> (CAM). The group's chief executive officer Sacha Roytman Dratwa told Insider the situation is particularly concerning online.Insider reviewed <a href="https://combatantisemitism.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Data-Finding-Presentation-Holocaust-Trivialization-January-18-1.pptx">a study</a> conducted by CAM and the online monitoring agency Buzzilla which scanned content across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, news sites, and forums over two years between January 2020 and December 2021.By isolating specific word combinations, the scanning identified more than 60 million online engagements (posts, comments, reactions, shares) in which the Holocaust and the COVID-19 pandemic were linked.The research, part of CAM's "CantBeCompared" campaign, in partnership with the International March of the Living, aims to end the minimizing comparisons.The group said that the campaign urges international, national, and local authorities and social media companies to treat Holocaust trivialization as hate speech."The trivialization of the Holocaust and the appropriation and abuse of its memory has become so widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic that outright Holocaust denial is receiving a tailwind, the likes of which we have not seen in generations," Sacha Roytman Dratwa said. "It needs to stop now."

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<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:400px"><div class="image"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50f1a96b69bedd633f00002e-590-443/40-year-old-virgin-ebay-dropoff-store.png?maxX=400&amp;maxY=300" border="0" alt="" Year-Old="" Virgin="" eBay="" Store="" scene="" width="400" height="300" /></div>YouTubeThe <keyword id="6357395" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="eBay">eBay</keyword> store in 2005's "40-Year-Old Virgin" seems dated-but it may just be retro.</div>What keeps eBay's top executives awake at night?
CEO <keyword id="789080" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="John-Donahoe">John Donahoe</keyword> hasn't shared his dream diary with us. But we have a pretty good read nonetheless, based on eBay's actions: The company is terrified about losing its sellers.
And the companies with the best prospects of stealing them away aren't Google or Amazon, but a host of startups.
<h2>Good times for eBay</h2>
Right now, things look golden for eBay, with the stock up 400 percent from its $10 nadir in March 2009. It is now breathtakingly close to matching the high of $58 it set in late 2004. Its core marketplace, eBay.com, is growing again, having recently crossed 100 million active users. Holiday sales were up 20 to 30 percent over 2011, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/08/us-amazon-ebay-holiday-idUSBRE9070X620130108">by some estimates</a>.
One can and should credit Donahoe's turnaround of the company, with an emphasis on innovation and an early bet on mobile. But there are also phenomenal tailwinds behind e-commerce right now. The growth of an Internet-connected global middle class, the ubiquitous availability of broadband, and the adoption of tablets and smartphones have made a friendly environment for eBay.
<h2>An armada of competitors</h2>
That same friendly environment has birthed a host of potential rivals. Their strategies vary, but they generally involve peeling off sellers in a specific category, tackling frustrations in eBay's selling process, or both.
The largest and perhaps most threatening is <keyword id="279712" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Etsy">Etsy</keyword>, which <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/etsy-just-raised-40-million-2012-5">raised $40 million last year</a> and is expanding internationally, targeting makers of handicrafts and other homey goods. Where Etsy is particularly strong is capturing that feeling of personal commerce—buying something from a real human being, with a connection to the item sold—that characterized eBay's earliest years.
A far less known rival is <keyword id="27550" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="bonanza">Bonanza</keyword>, a Seattle-based company. CEO Bill Harding tells me that revenues are up 60 percent year over year, and it <a href="http://www.bonanza.com/">now lists 4 million items</a>—a fraction of eBay's <a href="http://www.powersellersunite.com/auctionsitewatch.php">estimated 180 million listings</a>, but enough to provide a meaningful level of inventory for shoppers.
"Our emphasis is on stuff that doesn't have a barcode on it: home &amp; garden, jewelry, health &amp; beauty, fashion, collectibles," Harding says. "Items where taste matters."
Taste matters to consumers, but fees and ease of listing matter to merchants. Bonanza charges lower fees, Harding says, which merchants typically pass on to shoppers in the form of lower prices. Bonanaza has also launched a one-page listing form, which Harding thinks spurred eBay to simplify its own listing process. But he's pushing the envelope with tools like the Background Burner, a photo-editing tool which eliminates backgrounds from photos of items for sale. (Just Google "eBay fail" to see why this matters.)
There's likewise <a href="http://modcloth.com/">ModCloth</a> in apparel, <a href="http://yardsellr.com/">Yardsellr</a> in collectibles, <a href="http://gazelle.com/">Gazelle</a> in consumer electronics, <a href="http://fab.com/">Fab</a> in high-design objects, <a href="http://onekingslane.com/">One Kings Lane</a> in housewares, and <a href="http://www.bstocksolutions.com/">B-Stock Solutions</a> in overstocked goods. Some of this competition is coming straight from eBay veterans: <keyword id="1737728" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Yardsellr">Yardsellr</keyword>, Gazelle, and B-Stock were started by former eBay executives, and <keyword id="1497560" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="One-Kings-Lane">One Kings Lane</keyword>'s CFO and CMO hail from eBay.
They all tackle very different categories and customer segments. But what they have in common is an emphasis on unique ways of sourcing merchandise, pulling potential inventory out of eBay's orbit.
<h2>Highly mobile challengers</h2>
Then there are the startups born from the mobile wave, which are trying to capture goods that might never have made it to eBay in the old days.
SellSimple, a <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sellsimple-sell-everywhere/id564844291?mt=8">freshly launched iPhone app</a>, is working on the listing process directly, promising to make it easier to list on eBay—or Etsy, or a long list of competing venues for sale, including SellSimple's own storefront.
<keyword id="1776597" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Poshmark">Poshmark</keyword> and <keyword id="1780249" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Threadflip">Threadflip</keyword>, for example, <a href="http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-11-15/commentary/35120009_1_mobile-apps-ipad-and-android-apps-iphone-app">let you take a photo of your unwanted clothes</a> and sell them online—things that sellers probably would never have bothered to list on eBay.
Yardsale, a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-yardsale-the-startup-that-wants-to-give-you-an-easy-way-to-make-money-selling-your-old-stuff-2012-8">relatively new app</a> we profiled in August, is similarly photo-focused. Its founders say it's been successful at getting people to unload everything from motorcycles to office furniture.
"On mobile at least, it's a lot easier to get inventory than it is to get buyers," says cofounder Ed McManus. "One thing we realized is that many of the people who love Yardsale used to sell on eBay, but they left for a reason. They don't want to compete with the supersellers with feedback ratings and warehouses of cheap items. They want an easy way to sell and a fair price."
As a mobile app, aware of buyers' and sellers' locations, Yardseller is designed to broker sales between people near each other. That makes it more personal, too, says Yardsale CEO Ryan Mickle.
"People tell us they appreciate the people that they meet," Mickle says.
<h2>How eBay's firing back</h2>
eBay is not sitting back while these startups are nibbling at its edges. It's created a dedicated mobile fashion app, for example. And it recently <a href="http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/cab/abn/y13/m01/i09/s02">revamped its iPhone app</a> to allow direct photo uploads into listings.
It has also experimented with promotions where it's waiving listing fees in specific categories to encourage more selling. Right now, for example, it's <a href="http://announcements.ebay.com/2012/12/sellers-gear-up-for-next-year-list-free-in-outdoor-sports-winter-sports-and-golf-categories-from-january-1-february-28-2013/">running one for outdoor sports gear</a>.
More intriguing are its efforts to revive seller-focused initiatives it had tried and abandoned in the past decade.
We've noticed, for example, a wave of new job listings focused on seller management, including a position for a <a href="http://jobs.ebaycareers.com/silicon-valley/marketing-and-sales/jobid2630692-director-consumer-seller-marketing-ebay-jobs">director of consumer seller marketing</a>. (A former eBay executive tells us eBay eliminated many of its seller account management positions in the middle of the previous decade.)
eBay also appears to be reviving its long-neglected Trading Assistant program—sellers who register to operate storefronts or operate pick-up services to sell goods on consignment.
These drop-off stores once seemed to litter the urban landscape—remember the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qJ9yqFU_rI">scene in the "40 Year-Old Virgin"</a> where Jonah Hill's character attempts to buy something, only to be told that the goods in the store are only sold on eBay?
That was only seven years ago, but now they seem like remnants of a bygone era. San Francisco, for example, has one lone eBay drop-off store in operation.
Nevertheless, eBay appears to be pumping new life into the operation. In September, we heard rumors that eBay was approaching sellers to pick up goods for them. And sure enough, in its hometown of San Jose, Calif., and in Topeka, Kansas, eBay is running a formal trial where it's sending vans to pick up goods from buyers and take them to sellers.
As AllThingsD <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130102/ebay-tries-two-new-ways-to-sell-drop-off-points-and-home-pick-up/">reported earlier this month</a>, eBay's also having sellers operate drop-off points in malls, where they're evaluating goods for sale on the spot.
These efforts seem like a seller-focused flipside to <keyword id="1176722" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="EBay-Now">eBay Now</keyword>, eBay's new <keyword id="1659698" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Same-day-delivery">same-day delivery</keyword> service operating in San Francisco and Manhattan.
It's fascinating to think how eBay might eventually combine the delivery infrastructure for its pick-up and delivery services, though for now they seem to be quite separate initiatives. (eBay Now delivers goods from big, brand-name merchants, not small sellers.)
<h2>Why eBay has to deliver for sellers</h2>
Every marketplace operates in a delicate balance of supply and demand. Right now, eBay has a few great strengths going for it: a well-known consumer brand; a highly liquid marketplace; and huge, organic demand from a population that's spending more and more of its budget online.
That growing demand means that eBay's risks have now swung to the supply side. And unlike Amazon, which can buy and stock its own inventory—or even create entirely new things to sell, like the Kindle tablet—eBay depends on sellers for supply.
In the past decade, eBay made the mistake of resting on the laurels of its brand, buyers, and volume. The result was stagnant growth and a punishing stock crash. eBay got boring, stocking the same stuff everyone else had, with a shopping experience leached of the personality that infused the site in its early days.
eBay's personality gap seems like the most intractible challenge for Donahoe and company. Mobile apps are easy enough to build, and eBay has gone on a shopping spree for design and engineering talent.
But a sense of community is the most intangible asset of all, and not one that can be bought or sold, only carefully built over time. That sense of fun, of delight, of human interaction is the ultimate thing eBay has to reinvent—not just for shoppers, but for sellers as well.
The post-2005 implosion of eBay's amazing growth story is a living memory for Donahoe, who joined eBay right as things started to come apart. We have to think he's determined not to let it happen again. But it may be a bigger challenge than it seems.

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