COLUMN LEFT / MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT : There Can’t Be Compromise With Evil : Pat Buchanan’s influence at the GOP convention is reason enough to vote for Clinton.

On April 13, 1983, then-Vice President George Bush, speaking on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, told a gathering of thousands of survivors of the Nazi death camps that “the Holocaust serves as a universal warning. . . . The Holocaust is no metaphor; it is truth.” Unfortunately, he does not seem to understand the significance of that truth.

I am the son of two survivors of Auschwitz. My grandparents, my 5 1/2-year-old brother and most of the members of my family were murdered during the Holocaust. I was born in 1948 in the displaced persons camp of Bergen-Belsen, the site of the Nazi concentration camp of the same name. My cradle stood only a few hundred yards from the mass graves in which Anne Frank and tens of thousands of European Jews lie buried anonymously.

Last Monday, as Patrick J. Buchanan addressed the Republican National Convention, I remembered something else Bush had said on that spring day. “From the whispers of those lost in the Holocaust,” he warned, “the world must not repeat the hate; we must remember instead to teach tolerance, to teach respect and dignity for every man, regardless of race, color or creed.”

For me, unlike George Bush, the Holocaust is not a historical phenomenon to be used in a speech and then forgotten. As the son of Holocaust survivors, I know that indifference to evil constitutes the greatest danger to civilized society. People who condone bigotry are guilty of it themselves.

By allowing Buchanan to set the tone for the Republican convention and to play a role in his reelection campaign, Bush has given the lie to the lofty sentiments that he expressed in his 1983 speech to the survivors. With Bush’s consent, Buchanan used the prime-time platform to spew forth his ideology of divisiveness and to engage in the crudest possible gay-bashing and anti-feminist rhetoric.

Buchanan’s message was clear: Hatred is now an acceptable sentiment in the Republican Party, and promoting bigotry has become a legitimate political tool. Whatever else Buchanan may represent, it is not tolerance. Whatever else he may teach, it is not “respect and dignity for every man.”

George Bush and the other leaders of the Republican Party do not appear concerned by the fact that Buchanan tried to foment popular anti-Semitism during the months before the Gulf War by accusing American Jews of “beating the drums” for a war in which American “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown” would die. It also does not seem to matter to them that he has championed the cause of a succession of Nazi war criminals; that he has argued that it would have been impossible for Jews to perish in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp; that he once called Adolf Hitler “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier . . . a political organizer of the first rank,” and that he has referred to a “so-called Holocaust Survivor Syndrome,” which he described as involving “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.”

Eight months ago, I called on the President to repudiate Buchanan. Instead, he and the Republican Party have now embraced and legitimized Buchanan and his views.

Presumably, Bush approves of Buchanan’s rhetoric and hopes that it will help him hold onto the White House. He has certainly done nothing to dissociate himself from Buchanan’s poison-mongering. On the contrary, the entire country and, indeed, the world watching the convention, could see Bush’s surrogates in the Houston Astrodome, including Barbara Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, applauding enthusiastically during Buchanan’s speech.

Sixty years ago, Germany’s conservative politicians made a pact with the devil. They agreed to go to bed with Hitler and his Nazi Party, thinking that this would enable them to remain in power. They were convinced that they could control Hitler and that the Nazis were merely a fringe element of the German body politic that posed no real threat. In short order, however, it was the storm troopers and their leaders--the “Hitler Brigade,” as it were--who took over.

George Bush must now bear the consequences of having welcomed Buchanan’s support. There can be no compromise with evil, with prejudice, with anti-Semitism, with homophobia, with anti-feminism. Buchanan personifies all of these darker sides of the human persona. He represents the very antithesis of decency and tolerance. His ideological influence in the Republican Party, and his prominent place at the convention, should antagonize and alienate every American who rejects bigotry.