Product Description

ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson, Ph.D., describes disturbing parallels between how the Nazis treated their victims and how modern society treats animals. The title is taken from the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, himself a vegetarian: "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

The first part of the book describes the emergence of humans as the master species and their domination of the rest of the inhabitants of the earth. The second part examines the industrialization of slaughter (of both animals and humans) that took place in modern times, while the last part of the book profiles Jewish and German animal advocates on both sides of the Holocaust.

The Foreword is by Lucy Kaplan, a former attorney for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50255 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781930051997
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Isaac Bashevis Singer first suggested that "for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." Charles Patterson (Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond) expands on that risky analogy in his latest book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Patterson hypothesizes a risky causal relationship, too, when he writes, "since violence begets violence, the enslavement of animals injected a higher level of domination and coercion into human history by creating oppressive hierarchical societies and unleashing large-scale warfare never seen before." Was human "enslavement" of animals the first step on the road to the Holocaust? Patterson doesn't say as much, but it's clear that he feels our inhumanity to the nonhuman is one of our greatest evils.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"...sheds light on violence against animals and humans so that we might one day put an end to it." -- Moment Magazine, June 2002

"Compelling, controversial, iconoclastic...strongly recommended...a unique contribution." -- Midwest Book Review, May 2002

"Eternal Treblinka is an eye-opening, thought-provoking book that I highly recommend." -- The Gantseh Megillah (Montreal), April 2002

"Important and timely...written with great sensitivity and compassion...I hope that Eternal Treblinka will be widely read." -- Martyrdom and Resistance, March/April 2002

"There are good books...great books...and important books...Eternal Treblinka is all three." -- Satya Magazine, June/July 2002

From the Author
I'm dedicating the book to the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91), the first major writer to focus on the "Nazi" way we treat animals. The first two parts of the book (Chapters 1-5) put the issue in historical perspective, while the last part (Chapters 6-8) profiles Jews and Germans whose animal advocacy has been, at least to some extent, shaped by the Holocaust.

The conviction of Albert Camus that "it is a writer's responsibility to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves" helped me persevere through the writing of this book. When it looked as if I might never find a publisher brave enough to publish it (some said the book was "too strong"), I took comfort from Franz Kafka's view: "I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So it can make us happy? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all....A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us."

If the issue of the exploitation and slaughter of animals moves to center stage in the twenty-first century the way the issue of human slavery did in America in the nineteenth century--and I think it will--my hope is that this book will be in the thick of the debate. --from Preface

Customer Reviews

Excellent. Should be widely read.
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."

Eternal Treblinka has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
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."

Educational and Interesting for All Audiences
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.