June/July
2002
Special
Section
Animals and the Holocaust: Reviews of Eternal Treblinka
Book Review by Karen Davis, Ph.D.
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Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and
thinks: they’re only animals. —Theodor Adorno
Parallels between our treatment of nonhuman animals and humans considered
to be less than human is what this harrowing book is about. To view
such parallels as an insult to humankind merely illustrates its thesis.
In her Foreward, attorney Lucy Rosen Kaplan says that Eternal Treblinka should
be read by all who are not afraid to understand that the suffering
that humans have so relentlessly inflicted on animals over the course
of our species’ history is one and the same with the suffering
we so often inflict on each other. Eternal Treblinka should also
be read by those who shy away from this thesis.
One of the values of Eternal Treblinka is that it places the
Nazi Holocaust within a larger psychological and historical context.
It isn’t only modern capitalist society that commits the atrocities
it depicts, although our society could hardly be topped. As Animal Liberation
Front founder Ron Lee says in the book, “We have been at war with
the other creatures of this earth ever since the first human hunter
set forth with spear into the primeval forest…Speciesism is more
deeply entrenched within us even than sexism, and that is deep enough.”
Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in Poland that began operating in 1942.
The title, Eternal Treblinka, is taken from the meditations
of Herman Gombiner, the main character in the Nobel Prize-winning author
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, “The Letter Writer.” Herman,
who lost his entire family to the Nazis, is thinking about a mouse he
befriended whose death he believes he caused, and his sadness leads
to a larger thought: “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.”
Eternal Treblinka presents theories from various thinkers including
Freud, Montaigne, Carl Sagan, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Ehrenreich
on
the human penchant for war, violence, and the subjugation of other
forms of existence. It looks at traditional methods of subduing animals
in
pastoral cultures, noting that “[c]astration continues to be the
centerpiece of animal husbandry.” The book examines how we use
language to vilify nonhuman animals, who in turn are invoked to justify
our vilification of other human beings. According to Patterson, the
“designation of the people of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as
‘beasts,’ ‘brutes,’ and ‘savages’ raised
the level of murderousness” towards them. In the 16th century,
the English denounced the Hottentots in Africa as traveling in “‘heardes,
like their animals” and seeming to “cackle like hens or turkeis,”
which made it right and “necessary” to torture, kill, and
enslave them. The voluminous record of hatred expressed by the Europeans
for the nonEuropeans they encountered in the 16th through the 19th centuries,
America’s obsession with brain size as the measure of intelligence
in the 19th and 20th centuries, the ubiquitous and iniquitous concept
of “lower animals”—all this fits neatly into packages
of ideas like that of the American psychologist and educator Granville
Stanley Hall, who declared at the turn of the 20th century: “We
are summoned to rise above morals and clear the world’s stage for
the survival of those who are fittest because strongest.” (Lest
we think such talk is out of date, several times in the past few months,
radio talk show hosts have asked me on the air why “the survival
of the fittest” shouldn’t determine how we treat other creatures;
a modern code phrase is “top of the food chain.”)
Readers may be surprised to learn that the author of The Wizard of
Oz, L. Frank Baum, wrote in the late 19th century that “[t]he Whites,
by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are Masters of the American
continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured
by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” Or that
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s father, a Harvard
professor, wrote that Native Americans were the “red-crayon sketch”
of manhood on a canvas “ready for a picture of manhood a little
more like God’s own image.” Or that the assembly-line idea
came from the Chicago stockyards so admired by Henry Ford, who adapted
the stockyard principle to the manufacture of cars. Or that Ford published
anti-Semitic tracts that fueled pogroms against Jewish communities
in
Russia and inspired Hitler, who kept a life-sized portrait of Ford
in his office and praised Ford in Mein Kampf.
Eternal Treblinka documents America’s support for Nazi (and
global) eugenics—“the science of the improvement of the human
race by breeding,” in the words of poultry researcher and human
eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. Foundations like Rockefeller provided
extensive financial support. “Learned” American men visited
German racial hygiene institutes and wrote fulsomely about the “clean,
virile, genius-bearing [Nordic] blood, streaming down the ages through
the unerring action of heredity” sweeping us on to “higher
and nobler destinies.” In America, compulsory sterilization and
castration were used to punish criminals, prevent further crime, and
conquer imbecility. In the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in
1927, the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination and serving
in the armed forces “is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian
tubes.”
The Road/Stairway to Heaven
American and German eugenics is an offshoot of farmed animal science.
Charles B. Davenport, also a member of the American Breeders’ Association,
was the director of the Eugenics Record Office established in 1910 on
Long Island; his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, was also a chicken breeding
experimenter, as was Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS. Other high-ranking
Nazis translated the language and procedures of farm animal experiments
into human improvement and annihilation programs designed to “eliminate
inferior blood,” “free people from the burden of the mentally
ill,” “lure victims into gas chambers, kill them on an assembly
line, and process their corpses.”
Patterson shows how human concentration and killing centers are virtually
identical to farmed animal concentration and killing centers. Tubes
into which cows and pigs are driven single-file to their deaths are
no different from the tubes at Treblinka and elsewhere that led from
the disrobing rooms to the gas chambers, down which naked people were
driven by guards using their fists, whips, and rifle butts—which
is how we treat millions of farmed animals everyday. The SS called its
tube leading to the death center the “Road to Heaven,” but,
Patterson asks, how does their mockery differ from meat industry scientist
Temple Grandin, who calls the tube she designed for driving cattle to
their death the “Stairway to Heaven”?
Some will say that treating creatures badly in order to eat them is
a far cry from treating creatures badly simply because you hate them,
but a key point of Eternal Treblinka is that the psychology
of contempt for “inferior life” links the Nazi mentality to that
which allows us to torture and kill billions of nonhuman animals and
human beings with no more concern for them and their suffering than
Hannibal Lecter and Jame Gumb feel for their victims—apart from
the pleasure they derive from the taste of their victims’ pain—in
The Silence of the Lambs. That book says that the plight of the lambs
screaming in the slaughterhouses—the whole human enterprise of
degradation, cruelty, and murder—“will not end, ever.”
Eternal Treblinka reminds us of all those other slaughterhouses
that were running alongside the human ones—the “[a]round-the-clock
killing and butchering” conducted at Treblinka, Auschwitz, in Dresden,
and elsewhere. In their diaries and letters, Nazi officials dwell on
their meals. One writes to his wife: “The sight of the dead—including
women and children—is not very cheering. Once the cold weather
sets in you’ll be getting a goose now and again. There are over
200 chattering around here, as well as cows, calves, pigs, hens and
turkeys. We live like princes. Today, Sunday, we had roast goose. This
evening we are having pigeon.”
It’s been said that if most people had direct contact with the
animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet
to support this hope. It isn’t just the Nazis who could see birds
in the yard, slaughter them and eat them without a qualm, and in fact
with euphoria. In this respect, the persecuted Jewish communities were
no different from their persecutors. In the chapter entitled “This
Boundless Slaughterhouse,” we see the Jewish communities of Poland
through the eyes of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), who grew up in
a Polish village, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi, before emigrating
to America in 1935. In story after story, Singer describes the slaughtering
of animals he witnessed in the village courtyards. In Warsaw, people
brought chickens, ducks, and geese to be slaughtered. “The butchers
began to pluck their feathers even while those creatures were still
alive and wallowing in their own blood...Women push forward each with
her fowl to be killed. Porters load baskets with dead birds and carry
them off to the pluckers. This hell made mockery of all blather about
humanism.”
Growing up, Singer sought to understand the endless bloodbaths that
others took in stride, and worse. He writes: “I had studied in
the book of Leviticus about the sacrifices the priests used to burn
on the altar: the sheep, the rams, the goats, and the doves whose heads
they wrung off and whose blood they sprung as a sweet savor unto the
Lord. And again and again I asked myself why should God, the Creator
of all men and all creatures, enjoy such horrors?” In New York
City, Singer decided—“A combination of a slaughterhouse, a
bordello, and an insane asylum—that’s what the world really
is.”
Lessons Learned?
In Eternal Treblinka chickens and pigs shriek as they are being
cursed and butchered. Nazis bear their souls in their letters and diaries.
We read the opposing testimony of Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
The artist Sue Coe’s descriptions of the slaughterhouses she visited
are excruciating: if people can read her account and continue to eat
animals and drink their babies’ milk, what hope is there? A question
that is raised over and over by those who became vegetarians rather
than perpetuate the legacy of butchery in their own lives, is “How
can ‘we’ do to ‘them’ what was done to ‘us’
and not even recognize it?” Because this book shows, in the words
of Albert Kaplan, that so far “we have learned nothing from the
Holocaust.”
Christa Blanke, a former Lutheran pastor in Germany and founder of
the organization Animals’ Angels, cites a link between how we treat
animals and Nazism. First we strip the animals of their dignity—“The
degradation of the victim always precedes a murder.” But, we want
to know, why do humans want to degrade and kill? According to Blanke,
“because cruelty and greed always seem to get the upper hand.”
But why? Serial killer Ted Bundy said it wasn’t that he had no
feelings of remorse towards his victims but that those feelings were
weak and ephemeral compared to his rapacious emotions and drives. Naturalist
John Muir wrote that the people he knew enjoyed seeing the passenger
pigeons fill the sky, but they liked shooting and eating them more.
Eternal Treblinka thus raises questions, and we long for answers.
Why, in the words of Albert Kaplan, are the majority of Holocaust survivors “no more concerned about animals’ suffering than were the
Germans concerned about Jews’ suffering?” Isaac Bashevis Singer
says we pretend animals don’t feel in order to justify our cruelty,
but why do we want to be cruel to animals? Is comfort with cruelty,
taking pleasure in cruelty, a trait that we carry from our past as part
of our genetic survival kit? Why, when we have the technology to duplicate
animal products with textured vegetable protein, do people continue
to insist they have to have “meat”? Why do we praise technology
for developing substitutes for cruder practices in other areas of life
while balking at its use to eliminate slaughterhouses, which it can—and
already does—do? Has Singer’s philosophic vegetarianism had
any effect on modern mainstream Jewish ideas and lifestyle? And if
not,
why not? This is not to suggest that the Jewish community should be
expected to rise above the rest of humankind, but that the Jewish response
raises questions about our species no less than does Nazism.
Eternal Treblinka traces an attitude, the work of a base will,
that the Hitler era epitomized. It is the attitude that we can do whatever
we please, however vicious, if we can get away with it, because “we”
are superior, and “they,” whoever they are, are, so to speak,
“just chickens.” Isaac Bashevis Singer rejected this attitude
and the behavior that goes with it. The New York Times Book Review wrote
of him when he died, “He shied from chicken soup and became a devoted
vegetarian. From childhood on he had seen that might makes right, that
man is stronger than chicken—man eats chicken, not vise versa.
That bothered him, for there was no evidence that people were more important
than chickens. When he lectured on life and literature there were often
dinners in his honor, and sympathetic hosts served vegetarian meals.
‘So, in a very small way, I do a favor for the chickens,’
Singer said. ‘If I will ever get a monument, chickens will do it
for me.’”
Like Singer’s collected works, Eternal Treblinka is what
Singer called “a deep protest against the killing and torturing
of the helpless.” It says No to blaming God, Nature, and Original
Sin for the atrocities we choose to commit against our fellow creatures,
forcing humans and hens together into gas chambers and calling it a
humane solution. In conclusion, Patterson writes that “the sooner
we put an end to our cruel and violent way of life, the better it will
be for all of us—perpetrators, bystanders, and victims.” Who
but the Nazi within us disagrees? If we’re going to mass murder
someone, let it be him.
Karen Davis, Ph.D. is President and Director of United Poultry
Concerns, a non-profit organization which promotes the compassionate
and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned
Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry.
Her newest book is More Than A Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual,
and Reality (Lantern Books, 2001). For information, call (757) 678-7875
or visit www.upc-online.org.
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