Hitler’s Holocaust is one of the most iconic examples of human cruelty, systematic desensitization
and social manipulation in human history. That such brutality could possibly take place
in our modern world is a testament to the power of a lie repeated often enough.
Humanity must learn from the horrors of our past so as not to repeat them time and again.
So when those who survived the Holocaust speak, we, collectively, should listen.
This video will convey the words of Holocaust survivors and their family members.
These are their words, their stories, their lessons.
“What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of
the world? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all
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 [the animals], all people
are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.”
“So, as many of you know, I spent my childhood years in the Warsaw Ghetto where almost my
entire family was murdered along with about 350,000 other Polish Jews. People sometimes
will ask me whether that experience had anything to do with my work for animals. It didn’t
have a little to do with my work for animals, it had everything to do with my work for animals.”
Linking the human Holocaust to our treatment of animals has long sparked controversy, disgust
and outrage. Opponents view the connection as belittling and disrespecting the experience
of Holocaust victims and survivors.
But what do we say when those making this connection are themselves survivors?
“I totally embrace the comparison to the Holocaust. I feel that violence and suffering
of innocents are unjust. I believe that the abuse of humans and animals and the Earth
come from the same need to dominate others. I feel that I could not save my family, my
people, but each time I talk about cruelty to animals and being vegetarian I might be
saving another life. After knowing what I know about the Holocaust and about animal
exploitation I cannot be anything else but an animal rights advocate.
-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust
One survivor, known only as by his code name “Hacker,” when he participated in the Animal
Liberation Front raid on the University of Pennsylvania head injury lab, stated,
“I believe in what Isaac Basheivs Singer wrote … Human beings see their own oppression
vividly when they are the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”
“When I see cages crammed with chickens from battery farms thrown on trucks like bundles
of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced
onto trains leaving for the death camps). When I go to a restaurant and see people
devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates.”
Marc Berkowitz and his twin sister Francesca were among Josef Mengele’s victims, forced
to undergo brutal medical experimentation. He watched his mother and other sisters march
to their death in the gas chambers.
In fighting for the lives of Canada Geese in danger of being killed, Berkowitz said,
“I dedicate my mother’s grave to geese. My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she
did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose, too.”
“In 1975, after I immigrated to the United States, I happened to visit a slaughterhouse,
where I saw terrified animals subjected to horrendous crowding conditions while awaiting
their deaths. Just as my family members were in the notorious Treblinka death camp. I saw
the same efficient and emotionless killing routine as in Treblinka, I saw the neat piles
of hearts, hooves, and other body parts, so reminiscent of the piles of Jewish hair, glasses
and shoes in Treblinka.”
“For most of the society, life was lived as if none of this was happening. People had
regular jobs, concentration camp workers went off to work in the morning and came home at
night to loving families, a home-cooked meal, a warm bed. It was a job for them as it is
for the animal experimenter, the trapper, game agent, or the factory farm worker.”
-Anne Muller, who lost many of her family members in the Holocaust
“It is wrong to harm others, and as a matter of consistency we don’t limit who the others
are; if they can tell the difference between pain and pleasure, then they have a fundamental
right not to be harmed. … Unless you believe in fascism, that might makes right –
we do not have a right to harm others.” -Henry (Noah) Spira, animal activist and Holocaust
“I know firsthand what it’s like to be hunted by the killers of my family and friends,
to wonder each day if I will see the next sunrise, to be crammed in a cattle car on
the way to slaughter. In the midst of our high-tech, ostentatious, hedonistic lifestyle,
among the dazzling monuments to history, art, religion, and commerce, there are the black boxes.
These are the biomedical research laboratories, factory farms, and slaughterhouses – faceless
compounds where society conducts its dirty business of abusing and killing innocent,
feeling beings. These are our Dachaus, our Buchenwalds, our Birkenaus. Like the good
German burghers, we have a fair idea of what goes on in there, but we don’t want any reality checks."
So what lessons should we take from the horrific and unthinkable tragedy of Hitler’s Holocaust?
“The point of understanding the Holocaust in Europe is to prevent and halt other ones,
not to remain narrowly focused on that particular one, traumatic though it was.”
“That’s the real lesson of the Holocaust, isn’t it? That people could do everything
and anything to those that they deemed ‘sub-human.’ Which is, of course, what we do to animals.”
Not everyone has learned the same lessons as the survivors we’ve heard from today.
Albert Kaplan, a passionate vegan animal activist who lost family members in the Holocaust wrote,
“The vast majority of Holocaust survivors are carnivores, no more concerned about animals’
suffering than were the Germans concerned about Jews’ suffering. What does it all mean?
I will tell you. It means that we have learned nothing from the Holocaust. Nothing.
It was all in vain. There is no hope.”
"and life is an eternal Treblinka."
“And then, it finally dawned on me. “Never again” is not about what others should not
do to us. “Never again” means that we must never again perpetrate mass atrocities
against other living beings. That we must never again raise animals for food or for
any other form of exploitation. And that’s when I became an activist for animal rights.”
Please see the videos here for more information on what the animals are going through right
this very moment all over the world. Share this video around so
that these lessons are not in vain.
Many of the quotes I shared today are from Holocaust Educator Dr. Charles Patterson’s
book “Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,” a powerful,
respectful and thoroughly researched text. You can find the link to this book along with
other resources on the blog post for this video linked in the video description.
If you want to help support this activism, see the link here or in the description below.
Now go live vegan, hear their voices, and I’ll see you soon.
And I recall the admonition by famed Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer,
"that for the animals, all men are Nazis, and life is an eternal Treblinka.”
Subtitles by the Amara.org community