11/09/05 The Other Side of the Holocaust
Promotion of the most controversial book published in Croatia in 2005
- Animal Friends presents an intriguing book - Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson - and invite to a debate on the subject "Human Holocaust and Animal Holocaust"
The promotion of the book and the debate will take place in cooperation with the Department for Culture of the City of Zagreb on Wednesday, November 9, 2005, at 7:30 P.M. in the Hall III of the Faculty of Arts, Ivana Lucica 3, in Zagreb. Ms. Andrea Feldman, director of the Open Society Institute Croatia; Mr. Hrvoje Juric, assistant at the department of ethics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb; Ms. Suzana Marjanic, animal rights activist and scientist at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore and Mr. Zoran Cica, ethnologist and external associate of the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore will talk about the book.
Alex Hershaft, founder and president of the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM), spent part of his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto. After he escaped from the ghetto, he spent the rest of the war hiding from the Nazis in rural Poland. The Germans killed his father, and he spent five years in an Italian displaced persons camp before emigrating to the United States at the age of sixteen. In his review of Gail Eisnitz's Slaughterhouse, he wrote: "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 there, but we don't want any reality checks." (excerpts from the book)
Until recently Christa Blanke was a Lutheran pastor who served with her husband, also a minister, in a village near Frankfurt. She was born in war-ravaged Germany in 1948, and her mother insists she would not have survived without food parcels from CARE USA. In 1998 Blanke founded the organization Animals' Angels, whose motto is "We are with the animals." Blanke says: "We specialize in fighting livestock transport throughout Europe. Animals in transport go through tremendous suffering similar to what the Jews suffered when they were transported to the Nazi camps." Blanke thinks how 130 years ago the church remained silent about the slave trade because they were only black people. Fifty years ago the church remained silent because they were only Jews. Today the church remains silent because they are only animals. Blanke is aware that "the Holocaust comparison is not very popular in Germany and elsewhere, but to me it becomes stronger as I get more insights about the cruel trade with living animals." (excerpts from the book)
"The moral challenge posed by Eternal Treblinka turns it into a must for anyone who seeks to delve into the universal lesson of the Holocaust." - Maariv (Israeli newspaper)
"Important and timely... written with great sensitivity and compassion... I hope that Eternal Treblinka will be widely read." - Martyrdom and Resistance (Holocaust publication)
"Hard to read - but a must read! - how mistreatment of animals leads to the dehumanization and extermination of people as mere animals. Well-written and respectful of both Judaism and the Holocaust." - Rabbi Yonassan Gershom
Croatian edition of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust was published in a joint effort by Genesis and Animal Friends in 2005.
