This Thanksgiving I discovered that more than 200 members of my extended family died at concentration camps across Europe during World War II – and that is just on my one grandmother’s side. I’m sure Jewish students all over the campus have similar family histories. It was an eerie feeling looking over the family tree and finding a name, with only the word “Auschwitz” written under the name. Not much else needs to be said after that I guess.

As my grandmother and I sat around playing with my nephews, we tried to relive what it must have been like for our family during those troubled years. We imagined what it must be like, hiding in an attic from Germans with little kids like the cute infants playing right in front of us. How do you keep a kid quiet? Would you sacrifice your own child to try to save the rest of your family?

Then we went on to imagine what life must have been like at the actual concentration camps themselves. My grandmother, too old to work, would most likely be sent to the gas chamber immediately. I would most likely be spared the gas chamber (for a while), and sent to do hard labor with little food in unsanitary conditions. As hunger led to starvation, the work would still need to get done. Would I be able to withstand such abusive treatment, or would I have just given up? At what point do you break the human spirit?

Given this, any time the Holocaust is brought up it pains me. When it is brought up to make some sort of political point as it was on Hornbake Mall with the pictures of bloodied fetuses alongside pictures of starving Jews at concentration camps, it enrages me.

So what isn’t Students for Life telling you?:

1. The pictures they are showing are of partial birth abortions, which by even gaudy estimates are less than 2 percent of all abortions in the U.S.

2. Many times these pictures are altered or “Photoshopped” to make them appear more grotesque.

Students for Life have the religious belief that life starts at conception, which, even though I disagree, I respect. I take a more holistic approach, taking into account dependency on the mother and how far developed the fetus is though this is not to say I think I am right and Students for Life is necessarily wrong. The truth is, within the scientific community, and much like the rest of society, there are differing opinions about when life starts. However, Students for Life use their religious beliefs as the foundation for comparing a medical procedure available in every industrialized nation to the Holocaust. This is where they become offensive and anti-Semitic in that the ends of their argument is to belittle the suffering of the Holocaust, even if it was not their original intent.

And the problem is bigger than this one issue. The Holocaust has been consistently used to make political points, and those of us in the Jewish community should take this seriously.

Ex-Republican Senate Candidate Michael Steele compared stem-cell research to the Holocaust (and slavery in the United States) in front of the Baltimore Jewish council during his Senate campaign. Ex-Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore used images of marching Nazi soldiers to send some sort of message about his opponent and the death penalty during his failed run for Virginia’s top post. Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York said this about an abortion ruling: “That, Mr. Speaker, is a modern-day equivalent of the Nazi prison guard saying ‘I was just following orders.'” Couple all of this with the GOP’s position that those who don’t support the war in Iraq support the same brand of “appeasement” that led to Hitler’s rise to power. Noticing a trend?

Though I am Vice President of College Democrats, even I must admit that this phenomenon is not limited to the Republican Party – I believe it has become more mainstream. On the far left, you often see people comparing Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to Nazis.

We who care about the legacy and history of the Holocaust, and other atrocities that are increasingly being used as political tools, must speak up before the history becomes completely distorted. It’s not about political correctness – it’s about respect for the 6 millions Jews, and the thousand millions of others killed during the Holocaust.

Tim Hiller is the Vice President of the College Democrats. He can be reached at tiimbitz4786@gmail.com.