Holocaust survivors and campaigners have compared Donald Trump’s immigration ban to the unprecedented plight of the Jews.

Mark Hetfield, the chief executive of Jewish refugee programme HIAS, said Mr Trump’s executive order on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was a “tragic irony”.

Survivors of the genocidal horror, waged by the Nazi regime, have also said America’s refusal to accept child victims of the Holocaust resembles closing borders to Syrian children.

The US President signed an executive order this week that temporarily bans people from seven Muslim-majority countries, including refugees from war-torn Syria, entering the country.

“It’s a deep and tragic irony that Donald Trump is slamming the door in the faces of refugees right before International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” Mr Hetfield told Haaretz.com.

“The entire refugee convention came out of the Holocaust and the failure of the international community to protect Jews and survivors."

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

Mr Hetfield, the president of HIAS, which was formed in 1881 to help Jews already fleeing Eastern Europe, said the US had reached “rock bottom” and the “lowest point we’ve seen since the 1920s”.

The US shut its doors to immigrants in 1921 and did not lift it until after the Second World War.

“What is America without refugees,” said the US citizen.

“How can Trump claim ‘America first’ and abandon the values that make us America? When refugees come here, they’re considered Americans, not refugees. That’s what gives us credibility in the world.”

Canadian immigrant Gerda Freiberg, from the former Upper Silesian region in eastern Europe, survived three years of Nazi slave labour in a women’s camp in Sudetenland.

The 91-year-old described how camps for displaced people set up by the allies, during the Second World War, were as important as refugee camps now.

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She added: “There may be terrorists among some, but there are more decent people among them."

Manny Lindenbaum, who was chased by the Nazis as a small child from his hometown of Unna in Germany, in 1938, said: “When we talk about closing the borders or looking at refugees as enemies, they are talking about us.”

Mr Lindenbaum, who now lives in Jackson, New Jersey, attended a candle lighting Hanukkah ceremony with the Obamas in 2015.

“America is refugees, that’s what America is, the thought that they are a danger to us," he said. "That’s how it was when we came here. The US didn’t want refugees from Germany, including Jews, because they were fearful of criminal activity.”

Manny Lindenbaum, pictured at a Hanakkah ceremony at the White House in December 2015, talked of how the US was built with refugees (AFP/Getty)

Miriam Caine, the vice president of the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Philadelphia, also thought "closing the door to immigrants is 100 per cent wrong".

The 83-year-old added: "That's what hurts the most - when the door is shut in the face of a child who is not given the opportunity for a better life."

At least six million Jews are estimated to have died in the Holocaust, including 1.5m children.

Their comments came after a spike in hate crimes in the US, with 897 reports recorded in the 10 days after Mr Trump's triumph.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust chief executive Olivia Marks-Woldman Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust)

Speaking to The Independent, the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust chief executive Olivia Marks-Woldman said: “I think any anti-Semitic comments or discriminatory language just adds fuel to discourse and just adds fuel to this kind of language.

“But I'm reluctant to make any direct comparisons between the Holocaust and his [Donald Trump's] direct language.

"People marking HMD should learn about the past and reflect upon it and the continued relevance and what steps they can take to make a better world."

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which also commemorates victims of genocide since the Holocaust including in Darfur and Yugoslavia, will see around 6,000 local events.