Trump campaign ad features Holocaust survivor as 'fascist' allegations pile up

(JTA) - A new campaign ad for Donald Trump pushes back against Kamala Harris' claim that the former president is a "fascist" by featuring a Holocaust survivor who says Harris is disgracing his murdered family members with the allegation.

"Adolf Hitler invaded Poland when I was 9 years old. He murdered my parents and most of my family," says 94-year-old Jerry Wartski, an Auschwitz survivor and retired New York City real estate investor in the ad released last Friday.

"I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes. For her to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I've ever heard in my 75 years living in the United States," Wartski continues. "I know President Trump, and he would never say this. And Kamala Harris knows it. She owes my parents and everybody else who was murdered by Hitler an apology for repeating this lie."

The ad follows a mounting discourse about the use of the term "fascist" in the presidential race.

A growing number of experts on fascism, as well as officials who served under him during his four years as president, have said the label befits Trump, who openly admires dictators and has discussed using the power of the presidency to retaliate against his opponents. The discourse accelerated last week after The Atlantic reported that Trump had reportedly expressed admiration for Hitler's generals.

Harris applied the label to Trump herself for the first time during a CNN town hall meeting Wednesday night. Asked whether she believed Trump was a fascist, she answered, "Yes, I do." She also said Americans believe in democracy and "not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist."

The ad is meant to rebut the criticism at a pivotal time. An ABC poll released Friday found that half of registered voters consider Trump a fascist, suggesting that the concern could play a meaningful role in the Nov. 5 election. The poll, conducted before the most recent headlines, found that about 8 percent of voters planned to vote for Trump despite believing that he was a fascist.

Contrary to Wartski's suggestion in the video, Trump has referred to Harris as a fascist multiple times in the past. The poll also found that one in five voters would apply the label to Harris.

Wartski's deployment in the campaign ad reflects the particular resonance of fascism for Jewish voters given fascism's strong historical association with Hitler and the Nazis, and the degree to which Jewish ideas and concerns are playing a central role in the presidential race in its final days. Both campaigns are fighting for Jewish voters who make up significant constituencies in multiple swing states.

Wartski, a retired New York City real estate entrepreneur, is a registered Republican who has donated extensively to national Republicans, including Trump, and to local Democratic politicians, according to campaign finance records. Earlier this month, he accompanied Trump on a visit to the Rebbe's Ohel, the Queens gravesite of the last Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi.

In the ad, Wartski, rolling up his sleeve to show a number tattooed on his arm, is asked by a voice off-screen, "Why should the Jewish people support President Trump?"

He answers: "Because he's a mensch. I believe that President Trump is definitely going to be good for Israel, because in everything he's done up to now was in favor. He's never double-crossed anyone, and he never showed any weakness. ... He has always stood with the Jewish people and the state of Israel."

Until recently, Wartski - the honorary president of the Israel Heritage Foundation advocacy group, which last year honored Trump by giving him a silver Torah crown - had appeared in the media in conjunction with his real estate dealings. Much of that coverage was critical: A 1991 Jerusalem Report story revealed that New York City Fire Department investigators had pegged Wartski in a 1983 report at the center of a group of landlords whose properties caught fire at a rate more than twice the norm, at a time when many were seeking to push out single-room occupancy tenants to convert their units to more profitable ones. Meanwhile, the Village Voice placed Wartski and his two sons on a list of the city's "most heartless" SRO landlords in 1994, according to a 2017 New York Post report.

Wartski also drew attention more recently as the landlord of a Manhattan table tennis club whose operator, Wang Chen, credits him with facilitating her success in the sport.

Wartski gave his first-ever interview about his Holocaust experience in 2020 to Fox News, when he and his family traveled to Auschwitz to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation. He described narrowly evading death for two years in two ghettos - first in his hometown of Osjakow, Poland, and then in the bigger city of Lodz - before his family was sent to Auschwitz. His mother, Esther, was murdered there, while his father, Jacob, died of starvation after a forced march just before Allied troops arrived.

Wartski and his brother survived and spent years in Displaced Persons camps - where he said he first encountered ping-pong - before being allowed into the United States in 1949.

He said he had not told his children about his experience but had reconsidered as he reached 90. "Now I see that there are not a lot of people left who can tell the story," Wartski said at the time. "The stories that you hear are just unreal and unbelievable, and you have to talk."