What do you think of holocaust survivors who became vegetarians because...?!
If you have not had the opportunity to read Eternal Treblinka, I highly recommend it as Holocaust survivors draw the parallels between the way they were treated, such as being stuffed into overcrowded cattle carts and kept in pig pens before they could be transported, to the way animals are treated. The human slaughter houses for Jews and other people were mirrored from their animal slaughterhouse counter parts.
For example,Although the purpose of the German killing centers was the extermination of human beings, they operated in the larger context of society's exploitation and slaughter of animals, which to some extent they mirrored. The Germans did not stop slaughtering animals when they took up slaughtering people. Auschwitz, which its commandant Rudolf Hoss called "the largest human slaughterhouse that history had ever known," had its own slaughterhouse and butcher's shop. The other death camps likewise kept their personnel well supplied with animal flesh. Sobibor had a cow shed, pigpen, and hen house, which were next to the entrance to the tube that took Jews to the gas chambers, while Treblinka had a stable, pigpen, and hen house located near the camp barracks of the Ukrainian auxiliaries.
Hitler also showed little sympathy for the vegetarian cause in Germany. When he came to
power in 1933, he banned all the vegetarian societies in Germany, arrested their leaders, and shut down the main vegetarian magazine published in Frankfurt. Nazi persecution forced German vegetarians, a tiny minority in a nation of omnivores, either to flee the country or go underground. The German pacifist and vegetarian, Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, fled to Paris and then to Italy where the Gestapo arrested him and sent him to the Dauchau concentration camp (see Chapter 8).
During the war Germany banned all vegetarian organizations in the territories it occupied, even though vegetarian diets would have helped alleviate wartime food shortages.
When I was young, a man came to my school who was a holocaust survivor and he also noted that he was a vegetarian because he remembers the names he was called by Nazi officers, and the way he was treated like a piece of garbage and he saw the Nazi officers mirrored in the way we treat animals. So, most people will ignore the question and simply comment,"How dare you!?" but in reality, the similarities are to predominant to ignore. Who could possibly look a holocaust survivor in the face and say,"How dare you compare the horrors you have suffered to animals."?
I'm interested to know every ones answers and I'll leave you with a quote,
"Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won't be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn't know."
-Dr. Helmut Kaplan
Answers:
MY friend's mimma was a POW prisoner in a Japanese pow camp in Jakarta during WW2= they starved for a year. Her and her brother were small kids.
Her brother ate his shoes * leather* and she ate grass and mud.
WHen I was watching TV with her one time and a commercial of factory chickens came on TV, Lulu snorted and said" that was just like us, we were treated like those animals- packed in and starved".
She has always since then mentioned being treated like they treat animals in factory farms. She doesn't eat meat now. I have no idea if that is the reason. She is 73.
Hitler was a vegetarian too.
As if, she can put it in a way that people might understand- and as far as she sees it, it's seemingly normal to treat animals that way now, but when animals are treated that way, we don't notice like it's the same bad.
And this isn't right. Since people WERE treated that way, she needs us to know, animals are just like they were.
If Holocaust survivors want to not eat meat, then good for them. Everyone has their reasoning, many not want to be vegetarian simply because Hitler was. I wouldn't dream of telling anyone what they're doing is wrong, least of all someone with a tattoo on their arm.
I think that holocaust survivors have the right to eat as they wish, without being judged by self-righteous vegetarians.
Come to think of it, so do I.
I am unaware of any comparison between the two subjects. Maybe you would have liked the Auschwitz prisoners to have been killed Halal, or Kosher, fashion.
Dion J, you are a breath of fresh air. Excellent.
You have a neurosis.We look after our animals far better than Hitler and his lackeys looked after the concentration camp prisoners. It seems that vegetarianism is stooping to new lows, cattle, pardon the pun.
You appear to be suggesting that you decide what I can eat. Sorry. That is a joke, and you know it.It is interesting that your original question brought Fascism into the subject, exactly what narrow minded folks like yourself need. I will not be absorbed into your collective.
Most of the holocaust survivors/victims ate meat and had no problem with the way animals were raised just like the vast majority of the rest of the human population. I'm sure many of them would be offended that you compare what they went through to what a farm animal goes through.
I can't believe anyone gave fireball any thumbs ups for that answer. Colleen I reported her I wish you would also.
I have read it.
"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." -Theodor Adorno
I actually wrote a paper comparing the use of animals to the treatment of Holocaust victims for my Holocaust history class last semester. Honestly, when you think of all the ways humans brutalize animals, the animals are treated worse than the holocaust victims were.
I don't care if they choose to go vegetarian. Why are you singling them out?
They have the right to an opinion; so do I; so do you. Some of them see similarity between how they were treated and farm animals. Most don't see that similarity. In fact, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Holocaust Museum both condemned the book as insulting to the Jews who died in Nazi death camps.
My guess it's similar to comparing farm animals to slaves. Many, I'll even say most, black people are insulted by the comparison. IMO, that's why you find very few people of color who practice veg*nism in the US. People aren't farm animals. We see things differently, we suffer differently, we hurt differently. If you want to consider a cow/pig/ chicken your equal, go for it. I don't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_righ…