Excerpts from the incredible new book on the Holocaust and animals by Charles Patterson Artist Judy Chicago writes in Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light about how she came to realize that the designation of Jews as animals was what led to their being treated and slaughtered like animals. Buy this book at PETACatalog.com "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazi's; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." –Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Letter Writer" When she visited Auschwitz and saw a scale model of one of the four crematoria, she realized “they were actually giant processing plants—except that instead of processing pigs, they processed people who had been defined as pigs.” Chicago learned that since one of the essential steps to being able to slaughter human beings is to dehumanize them, ghettoization, starvation, filth and cruelty all helped to turn Jews into “subhumans.” By constantly describing Jews as “vermin” and “pigs,” the Nazi regime convinced the German public that it was necessary to destroy them. At Auschwitz, Chicago “suddenly thought of the ‘processing’ of other living creatures, to which most of us are accustomed and think little about. I began to wonder about the ethical distinction between processing pigs and doing the same thing to people defined as pigs. Many would argue that moral considerations do not have to be extended to animals, but this is just what the Nazis said about the Jews.” What was so unnerving about being at Auschwitz, she writes, “was how oddly familiar it seemed” since some of the things that the Nazis did in the camps are done all the time in the rest of the world. The “many living creatures are crowded together in despicable quarters; transported without food or water; herded into slaughterhouses, their body parts ‘efficiently’ used to make sausages, shoes, or fertilizer.” That is when something inside her suddenly went “click.” “I saw the whole globe symbolized at Auschwitz, and it was covered with blood: people being manipulated and used; animals being tortured in useless experiments; men hunting helpless vulnerable creatures for the ‘thrill’; human beings ground down by inadequate housing and medical care and by not having enough to eat; men abusing women and children; people polluting the earth; the oppression of those who look, feel or act differently.” Without the Homage of a Tear During the 20th century, two of the world’s modern industrialized nations—the United States and Germany—slaughtered millions of human beings and billions of other beings. Each country made its own unique contribution to the century’s carnage: America gave the modern world the slaughterhouse; Nazi Germany gave it the gas chamber. At killing centers, speed and efficiency are essential to the success of the operation. Just the right mix of deception, intimidation, physical force and speed is needed to minimize the chance of panic or resistance that will disrupt the process. At the Belzec death camp in Poland, everything proceeded “at top speed, so that the victims would have no chance to grasp what was going on.” Henry Friedlander (author of The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution) describes the streamlined operation at T4 facilities: “From the moment they arrived at the killing center, patients inexorably moved through a process to make their murder smooth and efficient.” At Union Stock Yards in Chicago, Jurgis Rudkus was struck by the “cold-blooded, impersonal way” the slaughterhouse workers swung the hogs up “without a pretense at apology, without the homage of a tear.”