Product Description

ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson, Ph.D., explores the similar attitudes and methods behind modern society's treatment of animals and the way humans have often treated each other, most notably during the Holocaust. The book's epigraph and title are from "The Letter Writer," a story by the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

The first part of the book (Chapters 1-2) describes the emergence of human beings as the master species and their domination over the rest of the inhabitants of the earth. The second part (Chapters 3-5) examines the industrialization of slaughter (of both animals and humans) that took part 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 Isaac Bashevis Singer himself.

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #360113 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Publishers Weekly, November 26, 2001
Charles Patterson expands on Isaac Bashevis Singer's analogy that "for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."

From the Author
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 deeply, so I took courses and read extensively to learn more. Yuri Suhl, author of They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, and Lucjan Dobroszycki of the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, editor of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, were especially helpful.

Later when I became a history teacher and looked for, but could not find, a book on the background of the Holocaust suitable for my students, I wrote Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond to fill the gap. The summer after its publication I attended the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Education in Jerusalem, where I learned more from Yehuda Bauer, David Bankier, Robert Wistrich, and other Holocaust scholars. Back in 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 it. The late AIDS and animal activist Steven Simmons described the attitude behind animal exploitation 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 realized this was the same attitude behind the Holocaust, I began to see the connections that are the subject of this book.

I am dedicating the book to the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91), who was 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 people--Jewish and German--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. And 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 the Preface

About the Author
Charles Patterson is a social historian, Holocaust educator, editor, and therapist. He is the author of Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond, The Oxford 50th Anniversary Book of the United Nations, The Civil Rights Movement, and From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall (co-authored with Marian Filar). He is a graduate of Amherst College, Columbia University (Ph.D.), and the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Education in Jerusalem. Dr. Patterson now lives in New York City. He is a member of PEN, The Authors Guild, and the National Writers Union.

Customer Reviews

Life changing book.
This is the most amazing book I've ever read in my life.
It's a life changing book, and I don'y think it's possible to remain the same after reading Patterson's work.
It's a master piece among all books that analyse the humans - animals relationship and the animal rights issue.
After reading Eternal Treblinka It's easy to understand why Isaac B. Singer wrote that " when it comes to animals all men are Nazis. For them it's an Eternal Treblinka."

Life-changing
This book shook my world up and left me changed as a human. I can't give a book higher praise than that.

A mind-shaking, life changing book
It is a mind-shaking, life-changing book.
As it is comparing our treatment of
animals with the Holocaust everybody
can imagine while reading how the
Nazi-maschinery has been worked well.
Today we do not take no action the same
way our anchestors didn't.
The most impressed I have been by the
strong support of that book by Jewish
people who are survivers of the Holocaust.
Nobody should miss this book.