IT is unfathomable to most of us that the Nazis could have behaved as they did in the Holocaust, but here is a shrewd explanation. Eternal Treblinka disturbs us, not because of any gruesome pictures or graphic descriptions of the Holocaust, but because (inevitably though tactfully) it holds up to us, its readers, a clear mirror to look at ourselves anew.

Charles Patterson is a social historian and Holocaust educator living in New York. In his book he explains the important parallel between the Holocaust and our treatment of animals. His preface quotes Franz Kafka: "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? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Alas, not every reader wants an axe to his skull so that his frozen attitudes may painfully be axed away. And therein lies a problem! But Kafka would have applauded Eternal Treblinka, already nominated for umpteen book awards in the States. It grips like a thriller, our attention held by two questions: how could they do it? and how could other people stand by and let it happen? - imperative to know, of course, to guard against a recurrence.

Patterson diligently traces Man's emergence as the dominant species - a very recent development in our history. We used to be afraid of many other animals; they could hunt us! But now, since their "domestication", we are the self-appointed Master Race and, with our technology, we can rule the planet with dangerous power, we can tame all creatures into submission. Sociobiologist Edward 0 Wilson laments this emergence of humans as the dominant species: "It was a misfortune for the living world in particular that a carnivorous primate and not some benign form of animal made the breakthrough".

This tendency in humans to be Nazis over all creation is what Eternal Treblinka is all about. The author recalls Sigmund Freud's observation that man, not content with mere supremacy, was pretentious enough to invent a large gulf between humans and other animals. This pretentiousness Freud called "human megalomania" (man getting too big for his boots). The Church in particular perpetrated this man-made gulf by granting "souls" to humans only; humans were special, a cut above the others.

Humans also are prone to making unfair divisions, between skin colours, races, creeds - and other species. ("It's not like us, kill it" is an inbuilt reaction we haven't learned to check.) This arrogance led to the quest for "racial purity" in the United States and in Germany and the enthusiasm for eugenics. Our habit of looking down on other animals, never really acknowledging their painience (chosen pets excepted -there is nothing consistent about this prejudice), led to a general vilifying of those animals we exploit as lesser beings. Racist remarks often liken victims to animals. And likening Jews to the animals that humans were accustomed to abusing was the start of the dehumanising process that enabled the Nazis to carry out their crimes against humanity.

Patterson details how our institutionalised cruelty to animals breeds violence against humans; it is the root cause of mistreatment of fellow humans. Slavery had been modelled on the "domestication" (enslavement) of animals. The Nazi's model too was animal exploitation; they already knew how it was done! At first just animal-breeding techniques were implemented for use on the Jews, eg compulsory sterilisation and euthanasia. Then death camps appeared emulating vivisection laboratories and slaughterhouses -all in hushed up and secret places.

Throughout the Holocaust, Nazis needed only to replicate the models already established for our use on animals. The slaughterhouses with their assembly-line conveyor- belts in the States had effectively kept their workers too rushed off their feet to reflect overmuch on their task, so human death camps were managed in a similar way. Even gold taken from the Jewish victims' teeth after their murder imitated the uses we have found for every piece of animal - from tusks, hides, fur, to bones for stocks and soap.

By exploiting animals so ruthlessly we have unwittingly set the precedent and impetus for some of our own species to be horrendously killed. The implication is: if we think it's all right to cruelly exploit any species that WE don't personally value, then why be surprised that the Nazis did the same to a group that THEY did not value? Does the pain of only our own species matter? Wouldn't extending our compassion to all things painient have been a good thing for all of us long ago, and a better example to set before the "naughty boys", the thugs?

Eternal Treblinka profiles people from the German-speaking side of the world. Christa Blanke, formerly a Lutheran pastor in Frankfurt, revealed: "During the Nazi period many Germans had some kind of 'pet Jews', the ones who were really nice and not to be mixed up with the 'ordinary ones'". The same thing happens to animals. There are pets like minipigs and riding horses, not to be confused with "slaughter pigs" and "slaughter horses". This ethical schizophrenia is openly supported by governments and the meat industry, while various media brainwash the public, as they did in Hitler's day.

Dietrich Von Haugwitz, from Eastern Germany, insists people at the time didn't want to hear details of the extermination: "If you know, please don't tell me. I don't want to know the details." (It would be too upsetting.) He sees the same denial operating today about slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories; we are all in denial. Perhaps now we do understand the two big questions in this book - and we can identify with them. The only problem is that Kafka's axe to the skull really is painful for us.

Freethinker, October 2002,

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