Charles Patterson - Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

In memory of

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

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 trans gressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other crea tures 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. "

Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Letter Writer"

My own parents are an example of individuals whose experiences of suffering did not stifle their impulse to alleviate the suffering of others. They both adored animals and empathized deeply with their plight. For my father, the passion was for horses. At one point in his unusual military career, he could no longer bear to subject horses to the weight of a human passenger, so he ended his equestrian days forever. My mother, who, to this day, makes the lengthy acquaintance of each dog she encounters on busy Manhattan streets, has more diverse interests. When small, furry fauna and large insect colonies could still be found everywhere in the borough of Queens, she regularly called my sisters and me away from other tasks to show us some amazing new accomplishment of a local squirrel or earthworm. And yet our requests to keep companion animals were steadfastly rejected, even as families around us, headed by parents less interested in animal life, went through generations of dogs and cats.

The reason always given was the inadvisability of becoming attached to a creature who would eventually die or be killed. My parents were adamant that we not be placed needlessly in situations in which we would have to experience loss and grieving. Only over time did I come to understand that it was the indescribable scale of their own losses during the Nazi era that imbued them with this excessive protectiveness. I eventually came to learn that my father had once had two young daughters and a wife, who were murdered as he watched, shortly before he himself was deported to a series of seven concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. My mother, only an adolescent, and newly married, was torn from family in Budapest in 1944 for transport to forced labor, where she survived by employing her artistic gifts as a mender of SS uniforms and regalia. These two uprooted and nearly spent souls ultimately met in a Displaced Persons camp in Salzburg and married quickly, as did so many survivors who somehow formed the resolve to start life anew.

Though my parents wished for me and my two sisters lives of lightheartedness, it was inevitable that we would be drawn by our empathy for their suffering to causes that attempt to uplift the downtrodden. Eventually, when I came to understand that the oppression of nonhumans on this Earth eclipses even the ordeal survived by my parents, my fate as an advocate for animals was sealed. At a time when few attorneys could find paid employment in the animal rights movement, I was blessed to spend years of practice working as investigations counsel for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Today, as I enter the field of public administration, the animals' plight will continue to direct my choices.

During my work on behalf of animal liberation, I have been renewed countless times by the literary masterpieces of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Eternal Treblinka is the first work of its kind to describe, in splendid detail, the enormous contribution of this literary genius, who stands, for me and many, as the animals' most compassionate champion in modern literature.

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 that humans often inflict on each other, must read and re-read this book.

Lucy Rosen Kaplan, Esq.

Baltimore, Maryland