The Eternal Treblinka Interview
with author Charles Patterson

By Claudette Vaughan

In the book Eternal Treblinka, not only are we shown the common roots of Nazi genocide and modern society’s enslavement and slaughter of non-human animals in unprecedented detail, but for the first time we are presented with extensive evidence of the profoundly troubling connections between animal exploitation of the US and Hitler’s Final Solution. We speak to author Charles Patterson.

Abolitionist: Eternal Treblinka is a book that was crying out to be written. What inspired you and how did this come about, Charles?

Charles Patterson: It's a long story but let me try to answer your question by telling you a little bit about my background, which I wrote about in the book's Preface. While in New York getting my Ph.D. 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, which led me to write 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 than others, that the powerful are entitled to exploit the powerless, and that the weak must be sacrificed for the greater good."
Once I realised this was the same attitude behind the Holocaust, I began to see the connections that are the subject of this book.

Speaking of Columbia University, where I received my doctorate, last year on the day before Commencement I took my Ph.D., which was framed, up to the Office of the President and returned it to protest the university's cruel experiments on animals which it has been conducting for many years despite protests and opposition. Anyone interested in finding out more about the university's animal experiments can go to www.columbiacruelty.com

Abolitionist: Tell us briefly what your book's about.

CP: Sure. It's about the similar mentalities 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. In my book I contend that the exploitation of animals is the model and inspiration for the atrocities people commit against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples. In the first part of the book (Chapters 1-5) I describe the emergence of the widespread belief that human beings are the "master species" and 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.

Abolitionist: Can you talk about non-human animals and your understanding of what Hannah Arendt, who covered the Adolf Eichman trial, called “the banality of evil." How do you view it?

CP: Certainly the denial and indifference of the bystanders was an essential ingredient that allowed the Holocaust to happen, and so it is today as we go about our business indifferent to the horrific suffering of the millions of animals that takes place day after day after day after day. Isaac Bashevis Singer was right that for the animals, it's an eternal Treblinka. Today the banality of evil is as simple as turning one's head, or saying "I don't want to know." The German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, who fled Germany after the Nazis came to power but returned after the war, put it well. He said, "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're
only animals."

Abolitionist: You dedicated your book to the memory of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Why?

CP: Singer, the great Yiddish writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, was the first major author to use the Holocaust analogy to describe the exploitation and slaughter of animals. And he knew what he was talking about since the Germans murdered his mother and other family members in Poland. So in many ways, it's as much his book as 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 his short story, "The Letter Writer," Singer writes about a man named Herman (he lost his entire family in the Holocaust) who befriends a mouse whom he names Huldah. For the book's epigraph I chose the words Herman says when he doesn't see Huldah anymore and assumes she must be dead:
"In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. '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.'" That's where the book's title comes from. I like to think that if Singer were alive today (he died in 1991) he would very much approve of
the book.

Abolitionist: 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.

Abolitionist: Did you expect the book to be controversial?

CP: When it first came out, I was not sure what kind of reaction it was going to get, especially after 83 American publishers refused to publish it (some said it was "too strong") and I ended up publishing it myself with the help of Lantern Books, which is the book's distributor. I didn't know if I should get ready to take a bow, or hide under the bed. But reaction has generally been quite positive. It's now in seven languages with five more translations in the works, including Japanese.

Abolitionist: What has been the reaction to your book from the Jewish community?

CP: I'm happy to say that the reception has been on the whole very positive.
Let me give you some examples: "Eternal Treblinka should be on every list of essential reading for an informed citizenry for the compelling comprehensiveness of the life-and-death story it tells." --National Jewish Post & Opinion (US)

"The moral challenge posed by Eternal Treblinka turns it into a must for anyone who seeks to delve into the universal lesson of the Holocaust." --Maariv (Israeli newspaper)
"Important and timely...written with great sensitivity and compassion...I hope that Eternal Treblinka will be widely read."
--Martyrdom and Resistance (Holocaust publication)

"Hard to read--but a must read!--how mistreatment of animals leads to the dehumanization and extermination of people as 'mere animals.' Well-written and respectful of both Judaism and the Holocaust." --Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

Abolitionist: As there are many Jewish people, past and present, working within the animal rights paradigm, do you think the level of suffering they have experienced or are sensitive to is the catalyst for making a great activist, or is it specific to the person or is it something else?

CP: I have a chapter in my book about Jewish animal activists who lost relatives in the Holocaust and who for that very reason are all the more determined to speak up for and defend animals. One of the activists, who learned when she was a little girl that most her relatives in Germany were killed in the camps, said about the plight of animals: "We were like that too."

Abolitionist: Were you concerned Holocaust survivors might be offended by your book?

CP: I certainly would have been sorry if that happened. As a Holocaust educator, I try very hard to be sensitive to the feelings of survivors and 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. 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 is 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."

Abolitionist: How do you plan to answer those who may accuse you of using
the Holocaust to advance animal rights?

CP: Although I believe the scope and magnitude of the Holocaust makes it a unique event and am 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, I do not agree with those who insist on making the Holocaust a sacred shrine that's isolated from the rest of the world. If I felt that way, I never would have written this book. I think the attempt to fossilize the Holocaust and keep it separate from and unrelated to the rest of history is a subtle form of Holocaust denial.

Abolitionist: How about those who might accuse you of trivializing 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 recognise 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."

Abolitionist: 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.

Abolitionist: There is no categorical imperative to kill non-human animals today and back in Nazi Germany there was no categorical imperative to kill Jews either. In fact, it was legal to do so. Who do you think is making up the rules as we go along?

CP: Those in power make the rules. That's the way it's always been. Since we emerged as the "master species" the way in Europe the Nazis emerged as the "master race," we now lord it over the "lower animals," deciding who lives and who dies. In this hierarchical arrangement, man--the most arrogant and destructive species the world has ever known--is on top desecrating the earth and bullying all its other inhabitants. Unless we change our ways quickly, we are destined for extinction.

Abolitionist: What do you hope your book accomplishes?

CP: Well, I can dream, can't I? I would like my book to become an international bestseller to that it brings to an abrupt halt to our unrelenting killing of calves, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and all the other innocents, but unfortunately that's not going to happen soon.

* * * *
Charles Patterson lives in New York City. He can be reached at
eternaltr@earthlink.net.