My maternal grandfather, my Zayde, didn't have a childhood. While most Australian kids play sport, go to school, pursue passions, and start discovering their independence, my grandfather spent his teenage years fighting for his life.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, my Zayde's world changed forever. In the coming years, he was to witness horrors that most of us, myself included, cannot even comprehend. The Nazis forced his family and others out of their home, and into a cramped room in the Krakow ghetto, which they shared with four other families.

On the day the Nazis liquidated the Krakow ghetto, his mother hid him, and told him to wait for his father to collect him. He never saw her, or his baby siblings, ever again - they were gassed to death in the chambers of the Majdanek concentration camp. He endured years of hard labour in the infamous concentration camps of Plaszow and Buchenwald, burying half-dead Jewish bodies after they were shot into mass graves, and paving roads using Jewish gravestones. He stole potato peels from the kitchen to survive. Just one week before liberation, his father was shot dead in front of him by the Nazis - which for the inmates was another routine roll call. This was all before his 18th birthday, an age at which most Australians have completed 12 years of schooling and are enrolling in further education or planning a gap year.

The Nazi regime was fuelled by racism, anti-Semitism, and hate. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Yet all over the world, anti-vaxxers are evoking Holocaust imagery to demonstrate the "hardship" and "oppression" they're facing - that is, certain vaccination requirements to uphold public health.

We've seen anti-vaxxers start wearing the infamous yellow stars, which Nazis forced Jews to wear to identify themselves, in Australia, the UK and US. Protesters against the controversial COVID bill in Melbourne waved signs depicting Premier Dan Andrews as Hitler. Much of the media has been no better; a clip of a Fox News anchor comparing Dr Fauci to the evil Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, renowned for his brutal experiments on Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, went viral for this depiction.

Not only is tokenising the Holocaust to serve an anti-vax agenda offensive, naive, and factually incorrect, such campaigns make it even harder for the Jewish people to honour and sanctify the memory of the Holocaust victims and survivors.

We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unsafe for Jewish people, as anti-Semitic hate crimes spike worldwide. One in four American Jews experienced anti-Semitism this year, according to a comprehensive report by the American Jewish Council. Four in ten American Jews changed their behaviour out of fear for being attacked.

In the US, Jews have been attacked in restaurants and in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan. During the escalation between Israel and Hamas in May, the Anti-Defamation League found over 17,000 tweets using variations of the phrase "Hitler was right" between May 7 and 14.

Just last Wednesday in London, a group of men spat and threw shoes at a bus full of Jewish teens heading to a Hanukkah celebration in the central Oxford Square. Just last month, Israel's ambassador to the UK was evacuated from an event at a London university as a huge group of pro-Palestinian activists protested against her attendance. Violence against Jewish students on campus is now the norm.

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And Israel, the world's only Jewish state, is the target of vicious hate campaigns which are increasingly less to do with its policy toward Palestinians, and more to do with the ethno-religious majority that lives there. The irony here is that in this new "woke" world, where inclusion is worshipped and racism is rejected, anti-Semitism somehow doesn't have a place in this era's definition of racism.

Concurrently, Holocaust denial and distortion is also becoming mainstream. Last month, a Texan executive director for education told a group of elementary teachers that they must present an "alternative" point of view when teaching about the Holocaust. Other than Mein Kampf, I can't recall an "alternative" point of view to the Holocaust, because there isn't one. It was a historical event that happened.

By evoking the memory of the Holocaust, the most devastating human tragedy of our time, anti-vaxxers are actively working against our efforts to remember the unimaginable tragedies of our murdered families, burnt in crematoriums and shot dead into mass graves by an evil, hateful regime. Though they may not mean it, they're fuelling the anti-Semitic vitriol that is once again seeping from the sidelines into the mainstream public discourse. They're distorting the Holocaust to serve their agenda - which is so different from the tragedy they are daring to compare it to.

It is within anti-vaxxers' rights to protest. Australia is a democracy. However, they should do so without using gold Jewish stars, or calling the government Nazis. Think about my Zayde, and the millions of other Holocaust survivors who bore witness to the worst that humanity has to offer.