Steve Litwok is intimately familiar with the horrors unleashed by the Nazis and their führer. 

“My family tree was completely pruned by Hitler,” the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors told me in a phone interview this week. “I grew up with family friends who all met in displaced person camps after the war. They all came to the New York/New Jersey areas.” 

Litwok knows who Hitler was. Donald Trump is no Hitler, he said. 

But Trump’s Democrat opponent and her leftist allies want Americans to believe that the former president is the second coming of Hitler. It’s a scare tactic and a lie, of course — one the left has been using with varying degrees of success for a long time. 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has amped up the “Trump is a fascist” rhetoric in recent days. It’s the end game strategy of a campaign built on Trump Derangement Syndrome and the sweeping narrative that the GOP presidential nominee —  and anyone who supports him — is a threat to democracy. The accomplice media has complicitly fed American voters a heaping helping of the same hair-on-fire rhetoric since before Trump’s first term in office. 

“Yes, I do,” Harris said when asked last week by CNN’s Anderson Cooper whether she believes Trump is a fascist, as the former president’s bitter former chief of staff said in a hit piece in the Trump-hating Atlantic. 

‘Oct. 7 Changed Everything’

But the “fascist” fear drum Harris, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and their surrogates are pounding in the closing days of the election is itself a fascist tactic — the people in power labeling their political enemies as despots and tyrants. 

To Litwok, the talking point is the last refuge of a campaign bereft of ideas. 

“To me, all you’re doing is stirring up fear among the people. What are you offering them?” he said. “They don’t have a message. Instead they create the fear of ‘what’s going to happen?’”

Litwok serves as president of Volunteers for Israel, which has for decades worked to connect Americans to Israel through volunteer service. The need has been exponentially greater since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, murdering more than 1,200 men, women, and children, 46 of them Americans, in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Many of the victims were raped, tortured, or burned alive. More than 250 people were taken hostage, with about 100 of those still locked away in Gaza, according to Israeli officials. 

The shockingly brutal terrorist attack precipitated Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider Middle East. It also unleashed a frightening wave of antisemitism, much of it on U.S. college campuses and even in the Halls of Congress, as leftists rallied around the Hamas cause which, ultimately, is the annihilation of the Israel and Jews themselves. 

“Oct. 7 has changed everything,” Litwok said. “My kids are out of school now, but I wouldn’t want to be sending them through college right now with the kind of harassment they’d be exposed to.”

‘They Went Through Living Hell’

The second generation Holocaust survivor and “registered Democrat who hasn’t voted Democrat for years” said the left needs a refresher course on who the Nazis and Hitler really were. He said the lesson just might begin with a third generation Holocaust survivor, Litwok’s son Yoni, who in 2020 detailed his search for his family’s identity in a presentation titled, “The Quest for the Hidden Torah.” 

In it, Yoni recalls the story of Steve’s father,  Zygmunt Litwok, a survivor of several Nazi concentration camps. Zygmunt was a teen when the Nazis invaded Poland. He and his family were forced out of their home in the small town of Dziedzice, located in southern Poland. 

“When I hear the word ‘Holocaust’ the first thing I think of are my grandparents,” Yoni told fellow grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in the 3GNY Stories Live series. 

As the invasion progressed, members of the Dziedzice Jewish community learned that the Nazis were planning to burn the town’s synagogue. Zygmunt and others snuck out and secured the temple’s Torah scrolls from the ark and buried them in the local Jewish cemetery. They thought the Nazis would eventually leave and then they could go back and retrieve them. 

“Little did they know how tragic the future lay ahead for them,” Yoni said in the presentation, available on YouTube. 

Yoni’s grandfather and his family were rounded up and ordered to board a train for another community where they lived crammed together with other families in a small apartment building in the Jewish ghetto. The Jews were made to wear identifying armbands. Things quickly grew desperate, and Zygmunt risked his life to go back home and seek food and supplies, Yoni recalled. His old non-Jewish high school mates saw Zygmunt on the train and warned him that if he ever returned to the community they would kill him. 

Zygmunt would never see his hometown again. But Yoni did. He traveled to Poland in 2018 in search of the Torah his grandfather spoke of, buried in the grown-over, abandoned Jewish cemetery. 

“The search for the Torah was the search for something even larger,” Yoni said. It was the pursuit of his family history, the search for the Jewish people. 

He learned the horrifying stories of atrocities unimaginable to most, and the hope carried for generations by the survivors of the Holocaust. He traveled to Auschwitz, the Nazi German concentration camp in Oświęcim, Poland, where the ghosts of an estimated 1.1 million human beings keep vigil in the shuttered camp’s shadows. 

Yoni spoke of Block 28, the “infirmary,” where his great-grandfather fell ill “and went there for help.” He was murdered there by lethal injection, Yoni said. 

“My nana’s father, my great-grandfather Israel, was murdered there in Auschwitz,” he said. “While Nana was with her father in the Lodz ghetto, there was a period of time when he was taken by the Nazis and beaten to try to find out where he had hidden his money and jewelry. Israel was held captive and tortured for 19 consecutive days. When he came back home his body was charcoal gray, bruised from head to toe.”

Israel was not the same when he came back, his great-grandson said. He was a broken man. 

Yoni said that when his grandmother, her sister and father first arrived at Auschwitz they were immediately separated. You can feel the heartbreak in Yoni’s retelling. 

“Nana always remembers him screaming the names of his daughters as he was pulled apart from them,” Yoni said. “She says they took one look at his bruised body and sent him straight to the gas chamber.” 

“My grandparents were very special people. They went through living hell just because they were born Jewish,” Yoni said. 

‘This Can’t Happen in America’

Hitler and his band of fascists brought that living hell to the world. That’s not Donald Trump, Steve Litwok told me, and equating the former president to Adolf Hitler is a disgrace and a disservice to the Holocaust dead, survivors and their families. 

Such are the sentiments of Jerry Wartski, an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor who told his story in a Trump campaign video.

“I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” Wartski, revealing his camp tattoos, says in the 90-second clip. “For her to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my 75 years of living in the United States.”

“She owes my parents and everybody else who was murdered by Hitler an apology for repeating this lie,” he says in the video. Wartski reportedly met Trump during a visit last month to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens, New York, marking the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.

Steve Litwok’s father died in 2002; his mother passed away in 2020, at the outset of Covid. She was 93. Genia Litwok’s obituary proudly notes that she was born in Lodz, Poland, and that she was a Holocaust survivor who was a prisoner at Auschwitz. The daughter of the late Chava and Israel Kohn, she was, as the obituary states, also preceded in death by her “beloved husband Zygmunt.” 

Litwok said he’s just glad his parents aren’t around to see the kind of politics the Democrats are playing and the antisemitism sweeping their adopted country. 

“They would be shocked,” he said. “This would have rocked their boat.”

“This can’t happen in America. They know this from Europe.” 

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Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.