RS:  For those not yet familiar with Eternal Treblinka, what's your book
about?

CP:  It's about similar attitudes 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. This parallel may surprise some
people, but as I contend in the book, the exploitation of animals was the
model and inspiration for the atrocities people committed against each
other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic
examples. In the first part of the book (Chapters 1-2) I describe the
emergence of human supremacy and the widespread belief that human beings are
the "master species." Then in the next part (Chapters 3-5) I 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, including the great Yiddish writer
and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer.

RS:  Isaac Bashevis Singer figures very strongly in the book, doesn't he?

CP:  In many ways, it's more his book than 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 Singer's
short story, "The Letter Writer," he writes about a man (he lost his entire
family in the Holocaust) who befriends a mouse. For the book's epigraph I
chose a passage from that story, the last part of which reads: "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 dedicated Eternal Treblinka to
Singer's memory, and I like to think that if he were still alive (he died in
1991) he would very much approve of the book.

RS: Why did you write the book?

CP: To answer that I would have to tell you my life story, and I'll spare
you that. Let me answer your question by telling you a little bit about my
background, which I wrote about in the Preface. 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 so much that I began an intensive study of the
Holocaust that led to 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 realized this was the same
attitude behind the Holocaust, I began to see the connections that are the
subject of this book.

RS: 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.

RS: Do you expect the book to be controversial?

CP: I'm not sure what to expect. As I told someone recently, I don't know if
I should get ready to take a bow, or hide under the bed. The early feedback
has been generally very positive, but this has come mostly from people
favorably disposed to the book's point of view. Since the book is bold and
original, I expect that for some people it may take some getting used to.

RS: Are you concerned Holocaust survivors might be offended?

CP: I will certainly be sorry if that happens. As a Holocaust educator, I
try very hard to be sensitive to the feelings of survivors and have 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. In Chapter 6 ("We
Were Like That Too") I tell 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. Their determination to relieve the plight of
the most defenseless and exploited of all the world's victims is, I think,
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."

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

CP: Because the Holocaust is utterly unique, I'm very 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. However, I do not agree with those who insist on making the Holocaust
a sacred shrine that's isolated from the rest of history and the rest of the
world. If I felt that way, I never would have written this book, which
examines the roots of the Holocaust and relates it to the human arrogance
behind animal exploitation and the vast array of injustices against humans
which have flowed from it. I think the attempt to fossilize the Holocaust
and keep it separate from and unrelated to the rest of history is an
insidiously subtle form of Holocaust denial.

RS: How about those who will say your book trivializes 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 recognize 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."

RS: In your opening chapter you write that a number of historians and
environmentalists have pointed to the passage in the Bible, in which God
grants humanity "dominion" over the earth (Gen. 1:28) as the main culprit in
western civilization's destruction of the environment and mistreatment of
animals. Are you aware that Jewish tradition interprets that "dominion"
passage as stewardship and guardianship rather than as domination?

CP: That's an important point. Three things need to be said about this. The
first point is that Judaism had little to say about how that passage was
interpreted in western history since it was Christians, not Jews, who
created European Christendom. As a result, the Genesis "dominion" passage
found in the so-called Old Testament--the Greek (Septuagint) and Latin
(Vulgate) Bibles and then after the Reformation in the Bibles translated
into English, German, French, etc.--was interpreted by Christian
theologians, not Jewish sages. The second point that needs to be made is
that what's in the sacred texts of a religion is not necessarily what gets
implemented. Religious adherents too often do not walk the talk of their
religion. What a religion professes and what it practices are frequently not
the same thing. The third point is that I have recently become more aware of
the traditional Jewish view of dominion as responsible stewardship. In fact,
I have already put an article on my website

(http://www.eternaltreblinka.com/overview.html)

that presents classic Jewish views of this Genesis verse, whose
misrepresentation has done so much harm.

RS: 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. A better
understanding of these connections should help make our planet a more humane
and livable place for all of us--people and animals alike. A new awareness
is essential for the survival of our endangered planet.

RS: What do you hope your book accomplishes?

CP: I hope very much that it will sensitize people to the kind of mentality
that produced the Holocaust and thus help reduce the chances of anything
like it from ever happening again. I also hope the book helps our society
recognize, acknowledge, and take responsiblity for our horrific treatment of
animals and helps curb our arrogant attitude toward the earth and the rest
of its inhabitants that is causing such environmental havoc. I would like
the book's discussion of the root causes of the Holocaust to reduce the
level of human and animal suffering in the world. What I would really love
to see happen, of course, is an abrupt halt to our relentless killing of
calves, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and all the other innocents, but
unfortunately that's not going to happen soon.

Copyright © Richard Schwartz and Charles Patterson, 2002

                            *   *   *   *

Dr. Richard Schwartz is the author of Judaism and Global Survival and
Judaism and Vegetarianism. Over 100 of his articles can be found on the
Internet at http://jewishveg.com/schwartz. His email address is
RSchw12345@aol.com

The email address of Dr. Charles Patterson is eternaltr@earthlink.net