RS: For those not yet familiar with Eternal Treblinka,
what's your book about?
CP: It's about similar attitudes and methods behind
our society's treatment of animals and the way people
have often mistreated each other throughout history,
most notably during the Holocaust. This parallel
may surprise some people, but as I contend in the
book, the exploitation of animals was the model
and inspiration for the atrocities people committed
against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being
but two of the more dramatic examples. In the first
part of the book (Chapters 1-2) I describe the emergence
of human supremacy and the widespread belief that
human beings are the "master species."
Then in the next part (Chapters 3-5) I discuss the
industrialized slaughter of both animals and people
in modern times. The last part of the book (Chapters
6-8) profiles Jewish and German animal advocates
on both sides of the Holocaust, including the great
Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis
Singer.
RS: Isaac Bashevis Singer figures very strongly
in the book, doesn't he?
CP: In many ways, it's more his book than mine.
It's his vision--what he expressed so very well
in his stories, novels, memoirs, and interviews--which
I write about in Chapter 7. As far as I'm concerned,
he said it all. I merely came along and filled in
the details. In Singer's short story, "The
Letter Writer," he writes about a man (he lost
his entire family in the Holocaust) who befriends
a mouse. For the book's epigraph I chose a passage
from that story, the last part of which reads: "In
relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the
animals it is an eternal Treblinka." That's
where the book's title comes from. I dedicated Eternal
Treblinka to Singer's memory, and I like to think
that if he were still alive (he died in 1991) he
would very much approve of the book.
RS: Why did you write the book?
CP: To answer that I would have to tell you my life
story, and I'll spare you that. Let me answer your
question by telling you a little bit about my background,
which I wrote about in the Preface. While in New
York doing graduate work at Columbia University,
I became close friends with a German Jewish refugee,
traumatized by her experience of living in Nazi
Germany for six years. Her story moved me so much
that I began an intensive study of the Holocaust
that led to my first book, Anti-Semitism: The Road
to the Holocaust and Beyond, published in the fall
of 1982. The following summer I attended the Yad
Vashem Institute for Holocaust Education in Jerusalem,
and upon my return to the United States, I began
reviewing books for Martyrdom and Resistance, a
bimonthly now published by the International Society
of Yad Vashem. My awareness of the scope of our
society's exploitation and slaughter of animals
has been a more recent development. I grew up and
spent most of my adult life oblivious to the extent
to which our society is built on institutionalized
violence against animals. For a long time it never
occurred to me to challenge or even question our
way of life. The late AIDS and animal activist Steven
Simmons described the attitude behind the way our
society treats animals as follows: "Animals
are innocent casualties of the world view that asserts
that some lives are more valuable thanothers, that
the powerful are entitled to exploit the powerless,
and that the weak must be sacrificed for the greater
good." Once I realized this was the same attitude
behind the Holocaust, I began to see the connections
that are the subject of this book.
RS: The photo on the book's cover shows a World
War II German soldier carrying off several geese
he's holding upside down by the feet. Why did you
choose this for the cover?
CP: One of the many books I read for my research
was The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against
War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians, 1939-1944,
edited by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research
and published by The New Press in New York. When
I saw the photo of the German solider carrying off
the geese, no doubt to kill them, I thought, "That
says it all." I decided the photo would be
a good one for the cover, and nothing came along
after that to make me change my mind.
RS: Do you expect the book to be controversial?
CP: I'm not sure what to expect. As I told someone
recently, I don't know if I should get ready to
take a bow, or hide under the bed. The early feedback
has been generally very positive, but this has come
mostly from people favorably disposed to the book's
point of view. Since the book is bold and original,
I expect that for some people it may take some getting
used to.
RS: Are you concerned Holocaust survivors might
be offended?
CP: I will certainly be sorry if that happens. As
a Holocaust educator, I try very hard to be sensitive
to the feelings of survivors and have made a special
effort to make them part of the book. Lucy Rosen
Kaplan, who wrote the Foreword, is the daughter
of Holocaust survivors. She did a beautiful job,
and I'm proud to have her statement open the book.
In Chapter 6 ("We Were Like That Too")
I tell the stories of survivors, children of survivors,
and people who lost family members in the Holocaust,
describing how and why they turned to animal advocacy.
Their determination to relieve the plight of the
most defenseless and exploited of all the world's
victims is, I think, one of the most moving parts
of the book. It reminds me of the observation Harriet
Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, made
more than a century ago. "It's a matter of
taking the side of the weak against the strong,"
she said, "something the best people have always
done."
RS: How do you plan to answer those who may accuse
you of using the Holocaust to advance animal rights?
CP: Because the Holocaust is utterly unique, I'm
very opposed to simplistic
comparisons of the Holocaust to other genocides
and to the facile use of the
term "holocaust" for everything from the
latest mass murder to a five-alarm fire. However,
I do not agree with those who insist on making the
Holocaust a sacred shrine that's isolated from the
rest of history and the rest of the world. If I
felt that way, I never would have written this book,
which examines the roots of the Holocaust and relates
it to the human arrogance behind animal exploitation
and the vast array of injustices against humans
which have flowed from it. I think the attempt to
fossilize the Holocaust and keep it separate from
and unrelated to the rest of history is an insidiously
subtle form of Holocaust denial.
RS: How about those who will say your book trivializes
the Holocaust?
CP: The claim that the exploitation and destruction
of the other inhabitants of the earth is "trivial"
says a lot about the person making such a claim.
Even those who care only about human life should
recognize that our exploitation and killing of animals
is very bad for human beings as well, since animal
agriculture and animal-based diets are having devastating
effects on human health, ecosytems, water and other
scarce resources, and worldwide hunger. So, I hope
Eternal Treblinka will be a wake-up call, that it
will be, to use Kafka's phrase, "the ax for
the frozen sea within us."
RS: In your opening chapter you write that a number
of historians and environmentalists have pointed
to the passage in the Bible, in which God grants
humanity "dominion" over the earth (Gen.
1:28) as the main culprit in western civilization's
destruction of the environment and mistreatment
of animals. Are you aware that Jewish tradition
interprets that "dominion" passage as
responsible stewardship and guardianship rather
than as domination?
CP: That's an important point. Three things need
to be said about this. The first point is that Judaism
had little to say about how that passage was interpreted
in western history since it was Christians, not
Jews, who created European Christendom. As a result,
the Genesis "dominion" passage found in
the so-called Old Testament--the Greek (Septuagint)
and Latin (Vulgate) Bibles and then after the Reformation
in the Bibles translated into English, German, French,
etc.--was interpreted by Christian theologians,
not Jewish sages. The second point that needs to
be made is that what's in the sacred texts of a
religion is not necessarily what gets implemented.
Religious adherents too often do not walk the talk
of their religion. What a religion professes and
what it practices are frequently not the same thing.
The third point is that I have recently become more
aware of the traditional Jewish view of dominion
as responsible stewardship. In fact, I have already
put an article on my website (http://www.eternaltreblinka.com/overview.html)
that presents classic Jewish views of this Genesis
verse, whose misrepresentation has done so much
harm.
RS: What connections are there between the mistreatment
of animals and the
mistreatment of people?
CP: That's really what the book is all about. I
maintain that the exploitation and slaughter of
animals was and is the model and impetus for human
oppression and violence--war, terrorism, slavery,
genocide, and the countless other atrocities we
humans persist in inflicting on each other. In the
book I show how the enslavement ("domestication")
of animals led to human slavery, how the breeding
of domesticated animals led to compulsory sterilization,
euthanasia killings, and genocide, and how the assembly-line
slaughter of animals led to the assembly-line slaughter
of people. A better understanding of these connections
should help make our planet a more humane and livable
place for all of us-people and animals alike. A
new awareness is essential for the survival of our
endangered planet.
RS: What do you hope your book accomplishes?
CP: I hope very much that it will sensitize people
to the kind of mentality that produced the Holocaust
and thus help reduce the chances of anything like
it from ever happening again. I also hope the book
helps our society recognize, acknowledge, and take
responsiblity for our horrific treatment of animals
and helps curb our arrogant attitude toward the
earth and the rest of its inhabitants that is causing
such environmental havoc. I would like the book's
discussion of the root causes of the Holocaust to
reduce the level of human and animal suffering in
the world. What I would really love to see happen,
of course, is an abrupt halt to our relentless killing
of calves, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and all
the other innocents, but unfortunately that's not
going to happen soon.
Copyright (c) Richard Schwartz and Charles Patterson,
2002
* * * *
Dr. Richard Schwartz is the author
of Judaism and Global Survival and Judaism and Vegetarianism.
Over 100 of his articles can be found on the Internet
at https://jewishveg.com/schwartz.
His email address is RSchw12345@aol.com
The email address of Dr. Charles Patterson is eternaltr@earthlink.net
