Vivid Book of the Month March 2005

Book of the Month

A Swift Kick to the Head
by Sara Singer
March 2005

Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson Lantern Books, 296 pages, 2002, ISBN 1-930051-99-9; $20, available through amazon and through www.powerfulbook.com

The ominous title of Charles Patterson’s book, Eternal Treblinka, is a mere harbinger of the gut-wrenching material between its covers. In a country where meat is a virtual dietetic staple and the teaching of the Holocaust is only a burgeoning reality in schools, this book’s thesis, which links the two, may be regarded as highly contentious. It is a radical piece of both pro-vegetarian and Holocaust literature and a plea, aimed at the ethos and appetite of the reader, to reevaluate their view of the less articulate and undoubtedly more defenceless of earth’s creatures: non-human animals.

Patterson, a Holocaust scholar and social historian, contends that the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants are the Treblinkas or the Auschwitzes of today. He argues that the brutal practices used by the Nazis - assembly line murder - are not singular to the concentration camps; that industrialised nations, especially the US, continue a mass slaughter of farm animals every day. This idea stems from Nobel Laureate and Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the most powerful pro-animal voices of the twentieth century, who Patterson most eloquently eulogises in chapter seven. It was Singer that wrote in a short story, “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
Citing historical records as demonstrable proof, Patterson explains that it was the American slaughterhouses of the late nineteenth century that indirectly inspired Hitler’s efficient method of killing.

During the twentieth century two of the world’s modern industrialised nations - the United States and Germany - slaughtered millions of human beings and billions of other beings. Each country made its own unique contribution to the century’s carnage: America gave the modern world the slaughterhouse; Nazi Germany gave it the gas chamber.

There are indeed strong parallels between the two. The historian evinces the idea that the Nazi’s extermination campaigns were made possible through the animalisation of humans. Exploiting and slaughtering animals came first; then comes the exploitation and slaughter of other people:

It is significant that the Nazis treated their victims like animals before they murdered them. As Boria Sax writes, many Nazi practices were designed to make killing people seem like slaughtering animals. “The Nazis forced those whom they were about to murder to get completely undressed and huddle together, something that is not normal behaviour for human beings. Nakedness suggests an identity as animals; when combined with crowding, it suggests a herd of cattle or sheep. This sort of dehumanization made the victims easier to shoot or gas.”

By this time, efforts had already been made by Nazis denoting pejorative terms like “Jewish pig” or “rats” to people in an effort to vilify and dehumanise them.

Through extensive research, Patterson intertwines the more macabre principles of Western civilization - hierarchy and exploitation - with current notions of mass production, megalomania and something of a “humanocentricity” to explain institutionalised violence against animals.

The book is divided into three main parts: the first is about the development of human supremacy and how this caste mentality applies to the Holocaust; the second explains how this belief manifested itself in the organised slaughter of animals; and the third is comprised of testimonies from animal advocates who were affected or motivated by the Holocaust.

Since the book’s publication in 2002, it has been translated into German, Czech, Polish, Italian and Croatian. In February of 2005, Für die Tiere ist jeden Tag Treblinka, the title of the German version, made the list as one of Germany’s top-ten important non-fiction books. Important, however, may be an understatement when describing this book, as it is describes a microcosm in mans’ history of destruction. It is the literary equivalent of a swift kick to the head that will jar the reader’s perception of animal cruelty hopefully beyond their next few meals.