Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

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; OUR TREATMENT OF ANIMALS AND THE HOLOCAUSTBy Charles PattersonThe 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

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 lessonsof 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 theoppression of animals and the oppression of human beings that aredo

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.