"Never Again"

 “Never Again” has come to represent a universal goal to prevent future genocides.  When the Holocaust ended and people in the death camps were liberated, almost immediately survivors began to say:

“Never Again”.  Never again would genocide devastate any ethnic, national, racial or religious group.  In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 

It is time to extend this protection to everyone on Planet Earth including those of other species:

Isaac Bashevis Singer – a member of a family perished in the Holocaust and a Nobel Prize winner for literature:  “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.”  From: “Enemies, A Love Story”

 Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Dachau concentration camp survivor:  “I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.”  From “Animals, My Brethren”.

Albert Kaplan, a Jewish-American whose parents’ families perished in the Holocaust:  “Around two hundred feet from the main entrance to the [Holocaust] museum is an Auschwitz for animals from which emanates a horrible odor that envelopes the museum. I mentioned it to the museum management. Their reaction was not surprising. ‘But they are only chickens.'”

Lucy Rosen Kaplan, daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose wife and two daughters were shot and killed before his eyes:  “I have really been haunted by Holocaust images my whole life, and there is no question but that I was drawn to animal rights in part because of similarities I sensed between institutionalized animal exploitation and the Nazi genocide.”

Dr. Alex Hershaft, Warsaw Ghetto survivor and Founder of FARM Animal Right Movement:  “It finally dawned on me. “Never again” is not about what others shouldn’t do to us. It’s about what we shouldn’t do to others. “Never again” means that we must never again perpetrate mass atrocities against other living beings. That we must never again raise animals for food or any other form of exploitation.”  “For the Animals, All Men are Nazis“

Charles Patterson, “I always felt that there was something ethically and aesthetically obscene about taking a beautiful, feeling animal, hitting him over the head and cutting him up into pieces and stuffing the pieces in my face.  My experience led me to a lifelong pursuit of justice for the oppressed. I soon discovered that the most oppressed beings on earth are non-human animals and that the most numerous and most oppressed among them are farm animals.”  From “Eternal Treblinka”.

Alexandra M., Holocaust survivor:  “In a state established on the scarification of more than a third of its people – the enslavement and mass murder of living beings has become part of the lifestyle: TV cook shows devoted to the best way of serving the flesh of living beings – murdered babies; and panels of judges voraciously delighting in the successful outcome.

Mark Berkowitz – one of “Mengele Twins”, a Holocaust survivor whose mother and one of his sisters were sent to the gas chambers in front of his eyes, during a public meeting to defend Canada geese:  “I dedicate my mother’s grave to the geese. My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.”

Theodor Adorno, German Philosopher,  “Auschwitz begins wherever

someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks “They’re only animals.”

 

John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel award winner in literature,  “Let me say it

openly: We are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and

killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed

dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating,

bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the

purpose of killing them.”

 

Dr. Helmut Kaplan, German Writer and Philosopher, “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.”

 

Charles Patterson, “All who are not afraid to understand that the suffering that humans have so relentlessly inflicted on animals over the course of our species’ history is one and the same with the suffering that humans often inflict on each other, must read and re-read this book.”  From Foreword to the book “Eternal Treblinka”.

Anna Kelemen, a Holocaust survivor who lost two of her relatives in the Holocaust:  “…an impassioned plea for justice for all creatures.”

www.VeganInternational.org,  www.RaoulWallenbergSearch.com