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Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

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When I first learned that Charles Patterson was going to write a book about "our treatment of animals and the Holocaust," I had some misgivings. I was aware that some animal rights advocates had made superficial, misleading comparisons between the treatment of animals on factory farms and the treatment of Jews and others in the Holocaust, and I knew that this had hurt the vegetarian/animal rights cause by giving people an excuse to avoid considering the many negative effects of animal-based diets. However, I was an early endorser of Patterson's project because I felt that we needed new, creative ways to alert people to the horrors of modern intensive livestock agriculture, and my knowledge of his character, sensitivity, and background convinced me that he would be an ideal person for this project.

My confidence in his ability to sensitively carry out this project was well placed. The book is very well researched (with almost 700 end notes), and it is written with great sensitivity and compassion. Eternal Treblinka does not equate animals and people. Rather, it shows how the frequent vilification of people as rats, vermin, pigs, insects, beasts, monkeys, etc., dehumanizes people and makes it easier to oppress, enslave, and murder them. He documents many examples of this process, relating it to the treatment of slaves, native American Indians, Japanese people during World War II, Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, and other examples.

The book carefully shows how the enslavement ("domestication") of animals became the model and inspiration for all the oppressions that followed. In particular. he documents a trail from slaughterhouse production lines to Henry Ford's assembly lines for the mass production of automobiles to Hitler's methods in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. He also discusses the myth of Hitler's "vegetarianism"--his diet of little or no meat he often followed to reduce his chronic health problems.

Throughout the book, Patterson is sensitive to the views of Holocaust survivors. Lucy Kaplan, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has contributed an eloquent Foreword. An entire chapter profiles animal advocates who are Holocaust survivors, children or grandchildren of survivors, people who lost relatives in the Holocaust, and those who have given thought to the lessons
of the Holocaust. Another chapter, "The Other Side of the Holocaust," discusses German and German-American animal advocates who began their lives in Nazi Germany.

There is also a chapter on the exploitation and slaughter of animals as a major theme in the writings of Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91), many of whose characters were Holocaust survivors. The title of the book comes from a statement by one of Singer1s characters: "...for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."

The connections between the mentality and methods behind the
oppression of animals and the oppression of human beings that are
documented in this important and timely book have great potential to stir Jews (and others) to start to apply Jewish teachings about the proper treatment of animals, and thereby to help shift the world from its present perilous, inhumane path. I hope that Eternal Treblinka will be widely read, that its message will be extensively applied for the benefit of both humans and animals, and that it will help lead to that day when, in the words of Isaiah (11:6), "no one shall hurt nor destroy in all of God's Holy mountain."

Robert Cohen writes, "One year ago I read an author's manuscript. Today, that book is in print, and you should
add this one to your summer reading list: ETERNAL TREBLINKA by Charles Patterson. I have just been informed by Mr. Patterson that his Eternal Treblinka has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. After reading Eternal Treblinka, I wrote this:

The flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Portland Oregon lasted six hours. On the plane, I read the rough draft version of "Eternal Treblinka," an extraordinary book written by Charles Patterson that equates the real life and death experiences of ten billion farm animals raised each year for human consumption to the same Nazi atrocities suffered by six million Jews who became Hitler's "Final Solution."

This is one of the best written, best researched animal rights books that I've ever had the pleasure to preview. Fresh from the memory of having read about Jews stuffed into cattle cars as they were being transported to the slaughterhouses of Aushwitz and Dachau, I myself became witness to the twenty-first century's foremost example of man's inhumanity to other living creatures. Our tortured kin. The animal holocaust.

Last Thursday morning, I drove from Portland to Mount St. Helens in Washington State. I had been attending the Raw Foods Festival in Portland, and found a few hours in between my talks to visit the scene of America's greatest natural volcanic disaster. On this hot summer day, I drove across a bridge spanning the cascading Columbia River, separating Portland from Vancouver. There next to my car was a 40-foot long silver van with holes large enough to see through.

Inside of the truck were dairy cows. They were packed tightly together-with no room to lie down. The cows had served man's purpose. Each individual lived her short lifetime of stress, first birthing a child who would be immediately taken from
her, then injected with hormones that would painfully stretch her udder, depleting calcium from her own bones so that she would generate enough milk to fill 100 half-pint containers for school children to drink each day. Her ancestors naturally produced enough milk to have filled just four of those same containers.

The cow whose eyes I look into for just one moment would be made to suffer through hours or days of driving hundreds or thousands of miles to what was to become a dairyman's final solution.

Yesterday she died a violent death shared by 10,000 of her sisters.

Today she will share that same fate with 10,000 other Guernsey and Holstein cows on Route 80 or Route 66 or I-95, in Kansas, New Jersey, or Florida, on highways and neighborhoods where your children and mine sleep comfortably unaware of the predestined doom for living beings who have done nothing to merit such treatment.

Tomorrow the same, and the day after that. Eternal death. Eternal slaughter. Eternal Treblinka.

A holocaust occurs while meat eaters turn the other way, denying that such horrors could possibly exist. Were the German and Polish people who knew the fate of those trucked to Buchenwald and Treblinka any less moral or guilty than those who comprehend the truth about what really happens to farm animals?

I followed the truck for a bit until it veered off to the left, and I continued my drive in another direction. I took the high road, and she took the low road, and her look will forever haunt me. Her body will produce 2,000 quarter-pounders for one of many fast food franchises.

Her anus and cheeks, arms and legs, back and udder will be served so that others can have it their way. Today's slaughter will feed 20,000,000 people, and the year's tally of Elsie and her sisters will add up to seven billion kids meals served.

I feel the slaughterhouse. I hear the screams and know their fear. I smell the sweat and blood and suffer their pain. I internalize the agony and distress of transported animals. I envision the once green fields in which these animals grazed and the cold metallic ramp and smell of warm sticky blood that flows on the slaughterhouse floor and stains the psyche of us all.

I imagine the stun gun bolt to the head. The upside-down hoisting and the sliced neck artery. The animal who chokes on her blood, and the man who slices off her legs as she kicks in fear from the ensuing pain of butchery. The last fifteen seconds of a death that no creature deserves. The arrogance of a man who eats the flesh and dares not consider the origin of each bite.

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote about a man's love for his departed pet mouse:

"What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

I ceased eating meat four years ago. I now look at my pet dog, whom my daughters rescued from a shelter one day before she was due to be injected with man's final solution. I have come to love her.

Her name is Tykee, the goddess of fortune. Is she unlike the baby lamb or calf who is separated from her mother and shipped to the exterminator? I reflect on the Amazon parrot who recognizes me and sings "hello" when I visit my parents. Does the bird with green feathers differ significantly from the chicken with white plumage?

Do they not feel pain and deserve the right to live? I cannot eat them. I can no longer be then cause for their pain, although I once was a part of their genocide. I once denied responsibility for the acts of terror that occurred outside of my vision...outside of my consciousness. Their bodies were cut into smaller pieces and were broiled, baked, and fried.

Oh, that same crime of arrogance to which I now plead guilty! My penitence? Community service. I explain the act to meat eaters, and some turn their backs on me. Close their eyes. Shut their
ears. Who wishes to deal with the truth and reality of death?

Arriving at Mount St. Helens, I carefully read one plaque after another, taking note of performances both heroic and ironic. I consider the day that once silenced the birds and boiled to death fish in the streams. A blink in the eye of geological
time that stripped the landscape of the color green, divested pine trees of their needles and scattered whole trees like matchsticks across barren mountain tops.

I examined the original seismographs and warnings from hundreds of scientists to the residents to evacuate their homes and come to terms with an absolute truth. I became dumfounded by the arrogance of one man, Harry R. Truman, who lived alone in a cabin aside the lake below a mountain that would soon explode with the magnitude and power equivalent to 27,000
Hiroshima-type blasts.

A man who declined to leave that mountain. A man who denied a truth shared by others. An arrogant man who looked death in the face and refused to respect man's destiny. I try to imagine his final moment of sensibility. At the same time, in my own mind's eye I call upon the face of a cow in a truck on a bridge."

When I first picked up Eternal Treblinka I must admit it was with some degree of skepticism. My reservations were not about the quality of the writing or research in the book; I had high expectations in that regard and the book in fact surpassed my expectations. I was concerned that the book might be too esoteric to have any general appeal. After all, people concerned about animals in our society are a relatively small group. People with a strong interest in the Holocaust are also a small and probably shrinking group. A book that combines the two topics, I reasoned, might appeal to very few people.
I was very wrong in my thinking here. This is a book with a very broad appeal. The book is not just about a single event in history (horrific as that event may have been) nor is it about the views of some "fringe" animal rights activists. This book drives at an issue central to all of human history; a problem that arguably has caused most of the preventable suffering since the dawn of civilization.
Patterson adeptly demonstrates how throughout human history mankind has created a division between both their own group and their "inferiors"-both human and animal. And how that division has led to horrific abuse of both humans and animals.
This is a wonderfully enlightening book, filled with overlooked and fascinating historical tidbits. Although history has never been a topic particularly interesting to me, I found myself frequently feeling compelled to stop and tell whoever was in the room, "Hey, did you know that.."
Eternal Treblinka is surprising for its readability as well as its broad appeal. Somehow, Patterson managed to turn this educational work of non-fiction into something of a page-turner.
This book is recommended for readers from a wide range of perspectives. Knowledgeable animal activists will find plenty of new information here. People who have some affection for animals but are on the fence regarding societal animal mistreatment will quite likely have a change in perspective after reading Patterson's unemotional and clearly well-researched historical account. This book may have a particularly powerful effect on readers who have ties to the Holocaust but who may not have given much consideration to the plight of animals. For my friends in this category, I know what their next gift will be.

ETERNAL TREBLINKA; OUR TREATMENT OF ANIMALS AND THE HOLOCAUST
By Charles Patterson

The title Eternal Treblinka refers to the ongoing holocaust of animals. The blindfold covering your eyes will drop while reading each chapter. Even vegans who advocate for a cruelty free lifestyle will find their eyes opening wide to the assembly line atrocities that are inflicted daily upon animals. This book is for each person who says, "Don't tell me. I don't want to know." The time to know is now. The time to act is now. The time to become the voice of the innocent and vulnerable is now.

The first five chapters of Eternal Treblinka give a historical background of humans and their treatment of animals. Humans have displayed a propensity to mistreat and degrade both animals and themselves. Usually the first step in vilifying another group or sub-group within the human species is to attribute animal-like qualities to them. This precedes the domination, enslavement, and slaughter of that group.

Stewart David, who is profiled in chapter six, states, "If the public is allowed to remain detached from the suffering of the factory farms, animal laboratories, fur farms, steel-jaw leg hold traps, rodeos, circuses, and other atrocities, these atrocities will continue. We must make them feel the pain of the creatures whose screams are hidden behind the locked doors, out of sight, out of mind. Their language may not be understandable to others, but we know what they are saying."

In one chapter Mr. Patterson discusses a worker who explains that on pig farms sows are forced to live on concrete and develop such painful conditions that they can't walk. "On the farm where I work", she states, "they drag the live ones who can't stand up anymore out of the crate. They put a metal snare around her ear or foot and drag her the full length of the building. These animals are just screaming in pain. They're dragging them across the concrete, it's ripping their skin, the metal snares are tearing up their ears." Mr. Patterson goes on to explain how worn-out sows are dumped on a pile, where they stay for up to two weeks until the cull truck picks them up and takes them to renderers who grind them up to make them into something profitable.

The mistreatment of people and the mistreatment of animals are connected.
The last three chapters parallel the treatment of animals and the holocaust. The slaughterhouse appears to hold the very same atrocities as the Nazi death camps. Eternal Treblinka forces the reader to face the horror of present day factory farming; it also awakens a soul to the plight of the voiceless.

While the screams of these creatures are kept comfortably hidden behind locked doors, they cannot be comfortably hidden from our collective consciousness.

Review by Patricia Rodriguez

This book does only one thing. It makes us confront reality. The reality of animal slaughter: in all of its gruesomeness and obsceneness.
The problem is that when people eat meat, they think it's just that: meat. They do not realize that what they are eating was once the flesh of an animal; they only see it as their dinner or lunch. Similarly, Nazi's did not see Jews as people; they only saw them as things that needed to be killed for a good cause.
This extraordinary book parallels our treatment of animals with holocaust. Not only the slaughtering of animals, but also the exploitation of animals.
The book starts off by showing us how Humans came to acquire the belief that we are supreme; above all other being on the earth. The book goes on to describe the industrialized slaughter of animals (and humans in genocide), and finally it gives profiles of holocaust survivors. These holocaust survivors can be seen as the voices of the animals; they were the animals at one point.

Every few years a book comes out that completely shocks the world. A book that forces people to change their ways, forces them to question what they have believed their whole lives, forces them to ACT, to DO SOMETHING. This is one such book. For those who have been eating meat their whole lives, this book will be a rude awakening. I know, because before this book I was only considering being a vegetarian. Now I am one.
I MORE than urge everyone to read this book. Living in ignorance is NOT a choice. We must expose ourselves to certain realities, this being one: animal cruelty is unjustified and wrong.

Eternal Treblinka is a book to be loved by those who believe pursuit of the truth is the way to the most valuable things in life. It naturally will be deplored by those who wish to maintain blind faith in social fictions to the effect that all is well as long as external enemies can be smited and the markets kept operating.
After defeating the Nazi Holocaust, our society expanded its own. Its holocaust against animals, nourished by 10,000 years of animal domestication, fed on the technological opportunities for managing and slaughtering animals that the Nazi Holocaust had used for managing and slaughtering human beings. The breeding for preferred traits, the exploitation and killing of "life unworthy of life," the killing in a depersonalized fashion as a matter of daily business with machinery designed for the purpose, the talk of "humane killing"--these are defining features of both holocausts. Eternal Treblinka argues that the long-ago enslavement of nonhuman animals informed the Nazi Holocaust. One of the key technological developments along the way was the animal dis-assembly line -- the slaughterhouse -- admired and imitated for manufacture by Henry Ford, who had a relationship with Hitler based on mutual admiration, Ford's antisemitism holding special appeal for his German penpal.
For some, reading Eternal Treblinka will pose problems because it reveals evil running through countless human lives that we are encouraged to consider good. For others, it will raise the difficulty that ignorance of its contents will be a sign of extreme naivete. We are each a part of the solution or the problem with regard to the animal holocaust, depending on what we choose to know and to do. Eternal Treblinka helps show us how to choose for the better.

"Eternal Treblinka" is a very sobering read. It should be required reading in all high schools and available in all libraries. Charles Patterson's excellent book offers a riveting comparison between our historical and continuing insensitive treatment of animals and the horrific treatment of Jews in the Holocaust.

Part I succinctly lays out important historical information about the influence that the domestication of animals has had on our society and the subsequent devastating impact which that has had, and continues to have, on all concerned: the animals themselves, the humans who feed upon the animals and, last but certainly not least, the entire planet itself.

Part II points out the frightening parallels in the practices and rationalizations utilized in the daily slaughtering of millions of animals in the United States and the slaughtering of millions of Jews and other innocents at the hands of the Germans in the Holocaust. I lack the words to describe the effectiveness of that comparison.

Part III then introduces us to people both Jewish and German whose experiences relating to the Holocaust led them to become advocates on behalf of the animals with the goal of bringing a cessation of animal exploitation in all its many forms. This leaves the reader with a glimmer of hope. But time is running out rapidly and unless our continuing support of this culture of violence against helpless, sentient animals ceases, we as a society, and, indeed, the planet itself are on a crash course with irreversible disaster.

Please read this book and then pass it on. The urgency of its message cannot be over-stressed.

I approached reading Eternal Treblinka with some trepidation. There was something confusing to me about the idea of connecting the cruelty and horror of the Holocaust, to the treatment of animals in our society. The word offensive crossed my mind briefly. How could one remotely compare the unspeakable torture the Holocaust victims endured with the suffering of barnyard animals and wild creatures?

Once I began reading the book however, I was introduced to the spiritual connection Jews have always had with animals. Isaac Bashevis Singer is a strong presence in this volume and through his quoted writings and ideas, the parallels become abundantly clear.

Reading Eternal Treblinka was a very disturbing experience. I found the book enormously informative and thought provoking and it stirred up realizations about myself I prefer not to face. I am a reasonably sensitive and compassionate person and I would certainly never wish to harm any living being intentionally. Yet, I now realize that my stated values and my day-to-day behaviour often contradict each other.

I am an animal lover from way back. Among the cards I carry in my wallet is a membership to the Fur Bearers, a well-known animal advocacy association located in Canada. My partner and I adopted the very first dog through Montreal Greyhound Rescue the day this organization opened its doors. We treat the pets in our home with kindness, love and respect. I cringe at news stories about animal abuse of any kind. I sit down to dinner and enjoy a juicy, thick, luscious rare sirloin steak; catch the contradiction?

An old expression goes, "what you don't see can't hurt you." I don't see the suffering the cow goes through in order to make my meal possible. I don't hear the frightened mooing while she is being pulled down the conveyer belt. I don't witness the cold-hearted cruelty while the cow is being handled on the way to the butcher's knife. To me, this piece of steak came from the meat shelf in my local supermarket, all neatly wrapped in transparent plastic in the right size, ready for my consumption and enjoyment. This cow has no face. I can eat this cow because there is no personal connection between us; at least no conscious connection.

We treat animals as if we were superior beings entitled to control and exploit them. Even those of us who profess to love and respect animals unconsciously debase them. We will say such things as "He eats like a pig", "She's as fat as a cow", "That guy is a dirty dog" and other such examples when making insulting comments about other humans. To demean human beings we compare them to animals.

This brings us to one of the main points of Eternal Treblinka. To convince it's citizens that it was necessary to rid the world of Jews, Hitler and his Nazis referred to Jews as lowly animals not worthy of human consideration or treatment. If Hitler could manipulate his followers into thinking of Jews, and the other poor souls on his extermination list, as being in the same class as common barnyard animals; then slaughtering them is no longer a matter of conscience. Only those beings we think of as in our total control and domination could be marked for death without a second thought.

There are portions in this book that are hard to read and imagine. Once or twice, I was tempted to close it altogether rather than think about the images described. I am not ashamed to admit that tears flowed down my face more than once while reading certain passages. The bottom line is the pain I felt in reading this book is nothing compared to the pain we as human beings are capable of inflicting on ourselves and other animals when we forget the connection all living beings share.

Eternal Treblinka is an eye opening, thought provoking book that I highly recommend as way of gaining additional insight into the psychology of the Holocaust.

Book Review: Gestapo of the Human Spirit

Eternal Treblinka:
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
By Dr. Charles Patterson
1-800-758-3756 * www.lanternbooks.com
ISBN: 1-930051-99-9

Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

In memory of the Cypress hens in Florida and Georgia, who were caged, starved, and gassed to death. "This is best for the chickens."-Leroy Coffman, Florida state veterinarian. March 10, 2002


Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. -Theodor Adorno

Parallels between our treatment of nonhuman animals and humans considered to be less than human is what this harrowing book is about. To view such parallels as an insult to humankind merely illustrates its thesis. In her Forward, attorney Lucy Rosen Kaplan says that Eternal Treblinka should be read by all who are not afraid to understand that the suffering that humans have so relentlessly inflicted on animals over the course of our species' history is one and the same with the suffering we so often inflict on each other. Eternal Treblinka should also be read by those who shy away from this thesis.

One of the values of Eternal Treblinka is that it places the Nazi Holocaust within a larger psychological and historical context. It isn't only modern capitalist society that commits the atrocities it depicts, although our society could hardly be topped. As Animal Liberation Front founder, Ron Lee, says in the book, "We have been at war with the other creatures of this earth ever since the first human hunter set forth with spear into the primeval forest. . . . Speciesism is more deeply entrenched within us even than sexism, and that is deep enough."

Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in Poland that began operating in 1942. The title, Eternal Treblinka, is taken from the meditations of Herman Gombiner, the main character in the Nobel Prizewinning author Isaac Bashevis Singer's story, "The Letter Writer." Herman, who lost his entire family to the Nazis, is thinking about a mouse he befriended whose death he believes he caused, and his sadness leads to a larger thought: "What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world-about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Eternal Treblinka presents theories from various thinkers including Freud, Montaigne, Carl Sagan, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Ehrenreich on the human penchant for war, violence, and the subjugation of other forms of existence. It looks at traditional methods of subduing animals in pastoral cultures, noting that "[c]astration continues to be the centerpiece of animal husbandry." And like the infamous 20th-century psychologist Harry Harlow, who devised experiments to induce terror in young monkeys and pathologic aggression in their mothers, herders around the world separate mother cows from their young by cruel and painful means: "The Nuer tie a ring with thorns around the calf's muzzle, which pricks the mother's udder. . . . Lapps smear excrement on the udders of reindeer does in order to keep their fawns from sucking them." The Tuareg "pierce the nasal septum of the calves with a forked stick that makes sucking painful." They "cut the noses of camel and cattle calves to keep them from sucking their mothers."

Eternal Treblinka looks at how we use language to vilify nonhuman animals, who in turn are invoked to justify our vilification of other human beings. According to Patterson, the "designation of the people of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as `beasts,' `brutes,' and `savages' raised the level of murderousness" towards them. In the 16th century, the English denounced the Hottentots in Africa as traveling in "`heardes' like their animals" and seeming to "cackle like hens or turkeis," which made it right and "necessary" to torture, kill, and enslave them.

The voluminous record of hatred expressed by the Europeans for the nonEuropeans they encountered in the 16th through the 19th centuries, America's obsession with brain size as the measure of intelligence in the 19th and 20th centuries, the ubiquitous and iniquitous concept of "lower animals"-all this fits neatly into packages of ideas like that of the American psychologist and educator Granville Stanley Hall, who declared at the turn of the 20th century: "We are summoned to rise above morals and clear the world's stage for the survival of those who are fittest because strongest." (Lest we think such talk is out of date, radio talk show hosts frequently ask me on the air why "the survival of the fittest" shouldn't determine how we treat other creatures; a modern code phrase is "top of the food chain.")

Readers may be surprised to learn that the author of The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, wrote in the late 19th century that "[t]he Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are Masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians." Or that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's father, a Harvard professor, wrote that Native Americans were the "red-crayon sketch" of manhood on a canvas "ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image." Or that the assembly-line idea came from the Chicago Stockyards so admired by Henry Ford, who adapted the stockyard principle to the manufacture of cars. Or that Ford published anti-Semitic tracts that fueled pogroms against Jewish communities in Russia and inspired Hitler, who kept a life-sized portrait of Ford in his office and praised Ford in Mein Kampf.

Eternal Treblinka documents America's support for Nazi (and global) eugenics-"the science of the improvement of the human race by breeding," in the words of poultry researcher and human eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. Foundations like Rockefeller provided extensive financial support. "Learned" American men, whom Patterson represents in short fascinating portraits, and from whose writings he quotes significant excerpts, visited German racial hygiene institutes and wrote fulsomely about the "clean, virile, genius-bearing [Nordic] blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of heredity" sweeping us on to "higher and nobler destinies." In America, compulsory sterilization and castration were used to punish criminals, prevent further crime, and conquer imbecility. In the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927, the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination and serving in the armed forces "is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."

American and German eugenics is an offshoot of farmed animal science. Charles B. Davenport, a chicken researcher and member of the American Breeders' Association, was the director of the Eugenics Record Office established in 1910 on Long Island; his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, was also a chicken breeding experimenter, as was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Other high-ranking Nazis translated the language and procedures of farm animal experiments into human improvement and annihilation programs designed to "eliminate inferior blood," "free people from the burden of the mentally ill," "lure victims into gas chambers, kill them on an assembly line, and process their corpses."

Patterson shows how human concentration and killing centers are virtually identical to farmed animal concentration and killing centers. Tubes into which cows and pigs are driven single-file to their deaths are no different from the tubes at Treblinka and elsewhere that led from the disrobing rooms to the gas chambers, down which naked people were driven by guards using their fists, whips, and rifle butts-which is how we treat millions of farmed animals everyday. The SS called its tube leading to the death center the "Road to Heaven," but, Patterson asks, how does their mockery differ from meat industry scientist, Temple Grandin, who calls the tube she designed for driving cattle to their death the "Stairway to Heaven"?

Some will say that treating creatures badly in order to eat them is a far cry from treating creatures badly simply because you hate them, but a key point of Eternal Treblinka is that the psychology of contempt for "inferior life" links the Nazi mentality to that which allows us to torture and kill billions of nonhuman animals and human beings with no more concern for them and their suffering than Hannibal Lecter and Jame Gumb feel for their victims apart from the pleasure they derive from the taste of their victims' pain in The Silence of the Lambs. That book says that the plight of the lambs screaming in the slaughterhouses--the whole human enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and murder-"will not end, ever."

Eternal Treblinka reminds us of all those other slaughterhouses that were running alongside the human ones-the "[a]round-the-clock killing and butchering" conducted at Treblinka, Auschwitz, in Dresden, and elsewhere. In their diaries and letters, Nazi officials dwell on their meals. One writes to his wife: "The sight of the dead-including women and children-is not very cheering. Once the cold weather sets in you'll be getting a goose now and again. There are over 200 chattering around here, as well as cows, calves, pigs, hens and turkeys. We live like princes. Today, Sunday, we had roast goose (1/4 each). This evening we are having pigeon."

It's been said that if most people had direct contact with the animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet to support this hope. It isn't just the Nazis who could see birds in the yard, slaughter them and eat them without a qualm, and in fact with euphoria. In this respect, the persecuted Jewish communities were no different from their persecutors. In the chapter entitled "This Boundless Slaughterhouse," we see the Jewish communities of Poland through the eyes of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), who grew up in a Polish village, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi, before emigrating to America in 1935. In story after story, Singer describes the slaughtering of animals he witnessed in the village courtyards. In Warsaw, people brought chickens, ducks, and geese to be slaughtered. "The butchers began to pluck their feathers even while those creatures were still alive and wallowing in their own blood. . . Women push forward each with her fowl to be killed. Porters load baskets with dead birds and carry them off to the pluckers. This hell made mockery of all blather about humanism."

Growing up, Singer sought to understand the endless bloodbaths that others took in stride, and worse. He writes: "I had studied in the book of Leviticus about the sacrifices the priests used to burn on the altar: the sheep, the rams, the goats, and the doves whose heads they wrung off and whose blood they sprung as a sweet savor unto the Lord. And again and again I asked myself why should God, the Creator of all men and all creatures, enjoy such horrors?" In New York City, Singer decided-"A combination of a slaughterhouse, a bordello, and an insane asylum-that's what the world really is."

In Eternal Treblinka chickens and pigs shriek as they are being cursed and butchered. Nazis bear their souls in their letters and diaries. We read the opposing testimony of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The artist Sue Coe's descriptions of the slaughterhouses she visited are excruciating: if people can read her account and continue to eat animals and drink their babies' milk, what hope is there? A question that is raised over and over by those who became vegetarians rather than perpetuate the legacy of butchery in their own lives, is "How can `we' do to `them' what was done to `us' and not even recognize it?" Because this book shows, in the words of Albert Kaplan, that so far "we have learned nothing from the Holocaust."

Christa Blanke, a former Lutheran pastor in Germany and founder of the organization Animals' Angels, cites a link between how we treat animals and Nazism. First we strip the animals of their dignity-- "The degradation of the victim always precedes a murder." But, we want to know, why do humans want to degrade and kill? According to Blanke, "because cruelty and greed always seem to get the upper hand." But why? Serial killer Ted Bundy said it wasn't that he had no feelings of remorse towards his victims but that those feelings were weak and ephemeral compared to his rapacious emotions and drives. Naturalist John Muir wrote that the people he knew enjoyed seeing the passenger pigeons fill the sky, but they liked shooting and eating them more-"every gun was aimed at them."

Eternal Treblinka thus raises questions, and we long for answers. Why, in the words of Albert Kaplan, are the majority of Holocaust survivors "no more concerned about animals' suffering than were the Germans concerned about Jews' suffering?" Isaac Bashevis Singer says we pretend animals don't feel in order to justify our cruelty, but why do we want to be cruel to animals? Is comfort with cruelty, taking pleasure in cruelty, a trait that we carry from our past as part of our genetic survival kit? Why, when we have the technology to duplicate animal products with textured vegetable protein, do people continue to insist they have to have "meat"? Why do we praise technology for developing substitutes for cruder practices in other areas of life while balking at its use to eliminate slaughterhouses, which technology can do? Has Isaac Bashevis Singer's philosophic vegetarianism had any effect on modern mainstream Jewish ideas and lifestyle? And if not, why not? This is not to suggest that the Jewish community should be expected to rise above the rest of humankind, but that the Jewish response raises questions about our species no less than does Nazism.


Eternal Treblinka traces an attitude, the work of a base will, that the Hitler era epitomized. It is the attitude that we can do whatever we please, however vicious, if we can get away with it, because "we" are superior, and "they," whoever they are, are, so to speak, "just chickens." Isaac Bashevis Singer rejected this attitude and the behavior that goes with it. The New York Times Book Review wrote of him when he died, "He shied from chicken soup and became a devoted vegetarian. From childhood on he had seen that might makes right, that man is stronger than chicken-man eats chicken, not vice versa. That bothered him, for there was no evidence that people were more important than chickens. When he lectured on life and literature there were often dinners in his honor, and sympathetic hosts served vegetarian meals. `So, in a very small way, I do a favor for the chickens,' Singer said. `If I will ever get a monument, chickens will do it for me.'"

Like Singer's collected works, Eternal Treblinka is what Singer called "a deep protest against the killing and torturing of the helpless." It says No to blaming God, Nature, and Original Sin for the atrocities we choose to commit against our fellow creatures, forcing humans and hens together into gas chambers and calling it a humane solution. In conclusion, Patterson writes that "the sooner we put an end to our cruel and violent way of life, the better it will be for all of us-perpetrators, bystanders, and victims." Who but the Nazi within us disagrees? If we're going to mass murder someone, let it be him.
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Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment Of Animals And The Holocaust is a grim, compelling examination of the emergence of industrialized slaughter of animals and a comparison of that technology, psychology, and philosophical rationale with the genocidal, methodical, industrialized slaughter of human beings in the holocausts of the 20th century. Controversial, iconoclastic, Eternal Treblinka concludes with poignant and inspiring personal stories drawn from animal advocates of Jewish descent whose lives and families were directly affected by the Holocaust. Eternal Treblinka is strongly recommended reading for animal rights activists and a unique contribution to Holocaust Studies reference collections.