ETERNAL TREBELINKA (Publisher: Lantern Books)
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
By Charles Patterson
Reviewed by Claudette Vaughan

Charles Patterson has produced a book in “Eternal Treblinka” that’s a must read for everybody in the animal advocacy movement. This is a book that makes a case for the comparison of the genocidal mind both evident in Nazi Germany with the slaughter of millions of Jews along with Gypsies, Disabled people, Homosexuals and Dissenters to the similarities of the modern day enslavement of millions of non-human animals on factory farms.

Being Jewish himself, Charles Patterson’s commentary is bold and compassionate. He is the modern day Isaac Bashevis Singer and infact the book is dedicated to Singer. Singer himself was a man who had no qualms about making such comparisons and Patterson’s title, “Eternal Treblinka” is from “The Letter Writer”, a short story by Singer where he said, “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

This is a terrific book. The first of it’s kind. A favourite chapter of mine was the clear and unadulterated Jewish voices speaking out on the subject of the Holocaust and the comparisons of the suffering and slaughter of today’s voiceless and whose advocacy of animals has been influenced and in some ways shaped by the Holocaust.

Part One of the book focuses on a fundamental debacle, human supremacy and the exploitation of animals while vilifying Others as animals.

Part Two focuses on the industrialization of slaughter, animal breeding to genocide and the killing centers in America and Germany.

Part Three focuses on the remarkable voices of the Jewish Holocaust – Connected Animal Advocates, the compassionate vision of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the other side of the Holocaust, i.e., German voices for the Voiceless.

We at the Abolitionist respectfully acknowledge that making comparisons between the two atrocities has caused controversy and anguish to some Jewish critics. However being an animal activist and spending a time in the sheds with factory farmed animals, with mass produced and slaughtered turkeys curious enough to run to the wire to see what’s going on, with enslaved pound animals who jump up to see if this is the day they will be saved, one cannot help but fail not to make the comparison.

There are questions on both sides of each atrocity that have not been answered to a satisfactory conclusion yet. The identical question that fits both concerns the denial of the majority of people in voicing the reality, persecution and slaughter of each powerless minority.

The most important unanswered question for me is really on the role of the myth of democracy in both allowing each atrocity to occur and then up holding the situation to such a degree that people are halted in their efforts to stop what’s occurring. There is a case here to base our commonalities out of.

There is still a great deal of knowledge available on the “how” of the Holocaust, but not so much concerned with the question “why?”

Virtually every account of the stance of the democracies emphasizes the inadequacy of the records kept on the occurrences of the Holocaust, the Masters indifference to the suffering of their victims and the high walls that were erected, physically and psychologically, so not to disturb their business of killing and in the slaughter.

Sound familiar? This is pure animal welfarism as we know it today in the West.

Business as usual fits the bill in both cases. A question we should be asking ourselves in animal advocacy, that can be learnt from the Holocaust is this; How did the systematic mass extermination and its call for urgency, largely be ignored from a few in the know to the ones who could have made a difference?

It’s been said from many Holocaust survivors that the Nazi Holocaust occurred because of the particular psychological make-up of the German people themselves yet what emerges today is the same technocrats, as the Nazi technocrats, still doing all the damage as the architects of genocide and their modus operandi repeat the same patterns of slaughter over and over again – “humane” killing.

Some examples include Nazi Germanys abnormal fascination with medical experiments aimed at the female reproductive organs to todays envisioning in the animal tested labs by Dr Edwin Chargoof in “the mass production of human embryos, states that what he sees coming is “a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.”

How does Nazi Germany’s medical killings and what they called “wild euthanasias” compare with todays unborn foetus having children and how the culling of immature eggs from a female foetus at its fourteenth week is no longer beyond the dreams of these necro technocratic male scientists?

Critics of the Nazi Holocaust comparison to that which occurs on factory farms today don’t want a comfortable demonization of the Holocaust and the Auschwitz camp. They don’t want the cruelties and events that transpired there relegated to the realm of myth or “just another holocaust in the course of human history”. They don’t want the comfort of distance to separate the all too concrete historical reality, thereby suppressing the local, regional and national context of this great catastrophe that western civilization both permitted and endured, and they don’t want the obscuring the responsibilities of the thousands of individuals who enacted this atrocity step by step. All this is understandable.

But the Animal Holocaust is no less chilling. I wrote this review for two reasons. First, the book is magnificent. Patterson is the first in hopefully what will become a genre and second, my final justification for making comparisons is based one a simple premise and it’s this: With a knife to our throat, all living creatures are identical.

Charles Patterson has carefully documented the links and obsession with the Nazi eugenic movement, he has provided new information and insights into the daily lives of animals and he has provided a gripping account of the Nazi Holocaust and the Animal Holocaust to those who may have assumed that both had little in common. He’s a man of compassion and we thank him for writing this book.