Sochi Piaskovski was 13 when he was taken from his home in Lodz, Poland, to the Treblinka extermination camp. He was never seen alive again; no one would ever know how death came to that scared, sweet-faced boy. His brother Jakub—the only member of the once-large family to survive the Nazis—was haunted for the rest of his life by nightmares born of survivor’s guilt. In them, his parents, Sochi, and all of his other brothers and sisters asked him plaintively why he hadn’t done more to rescue them.

Elsewhere in Europe, about the same time that Sochi was dying, cold and alone, another young man from Lodz named Antosz Kaminska was watching his brother suffer with an illness that could kill him. Antosz bartered with a camp guard, ripping a tooth with a gold filling out of his mouth and using it to “purchase” extra rations for his brother. That sacrifice helped save his brother, but the bloody wound in Antosz’s mouth grew infected. Untreated, he died. His sister, Janina, would cry for the rest of her life whenever she thought of the suffering of her beloved youngest sibling.

When the time came for the former Stella Hadra to flee Germany with her husband and children, it had to be done in secret. The four of them traveled from Berlin to Switzerland on a supposed vacation—this not long after the Nazis came to power—but sneaked to France and then on to the United States by boat. She never discussed it, but much of the rest of her family disappeared in the Holocaust. Her husband, Ernst—apparently fearful the Nazi campaign would spread worldwide—instructed his children to never mention their Judaism once they arrived in the United States. There, they had to start all over; the Nazis stole the textile factory that Ernst had owned in Germany.

Jakub, Sochi Piaskovski’s surviving brother, whose entire family was wiped out, was my father-in-law. Janina, the sister of Antosz, was his wife and my mother-in-law. Stella was my grandmother and Ernst—whose last name was Eichenwald—was my grandfather.

The Holocaust never left my in-laws. It hung like a cloud of incomprehensible horror, darkening their lives until they both died a few years ago, in their 90s. My grandmother never spoke of her family or her Judaism. As instructed by Ernst, my father never mentioned his religious heritage for years; I only learned of my Jewish ancestry when I was in my 20s, on Christmas Day, no less. Ernst had gone from a wealthy man in Germany to someone who had to start all over again working in someone else’s textile company in New York. These were people who lost everything, whose loved ones were ripped away from them and murdered in the most horrific ways, whose bodies disappeared into the fires of the Holocaust, who never fully recovered from the incomprehensible brutality that descended, unbidden and unexpected, onto their lives.

It is hard to fully comprehend the magnitude of the Nazi death camps and their impact on the lives of untold millions. But, even so, there are a few things I can say for certain: the Nazis, and the Holocaust they brought were nothing like Obamacare. Or the national debt. Or political correctness. Or criticism of economic inequality. Or the Tea Party. Or the Internal Revenue Service. Or the Obama administration. Or the Bush administration. Or any of the other masses of infinitesimal flotsam spewed up in self-pitying and hysterical analogies by vulgarians with more mouth than brain.

And, damn it, how dare so many of you politicians and political commentators and entertainers spit on the ashes of the earth containing the bodies of millions of the slaughtered, by making such asinine comparisons. How dare you belittle unspeakable suffering, how dare you brush aside the emotional torment of survivors, how dare you feed into the Holocaust denialism by pretending that some difference in political opinions is just as bad as the literal torture and destruction of millions of families.