From the holocaust to animal rights

Dr Alex Hershaft is one of the few survivors of the holocaust, more specifically the Warsaw Ghetto.  After being liberated, Alex spent five years 5 in an Italian refugee camp before moving to the United States in 1951 where he studied Chemistry and achieved a PhD. In the early 1960s he became a vegetarian but kept it as a private matter because he didn’t know any other vegetarians.

Alex was five years old when Germany invaded Poland. The Jews in Greater Warsaw were ordered to move to the Jewish section of Warsaw which was then surrounded by a wall topped by barbed wire and became the infamous Warsaw Ghetto.  Life in the Ghetto was a matter of existing and surviving. The normal functions of life paled in comparison with the quest for just staying alive. People were basically forgoing their usual norms of etiquette in dealing with one another in the quest for survival. People kept telling themselves to keep going for one more day. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be all over and the allies will come. If you gave up you were dead. Dying was pretty easy because there were no shortage of ways to die - typhus was prevalent and there was always a shortage of food. People didn't die because they gave up, they died because of the physical manifestations but if you didn't have the desire or the drive to survive it was easy to give up.

After he moved to the USA, Alex became an environmental consultant. In 1972 he was sent to a slaughterhouse in the mid-West to do an inventory on their wastewater problems.  He was on site one day when he turned into a corridor and was faced by piles of animal body parts. He was horrified and had flashbacks of seeing the piles of human remains in Auschwitz - glasses, suitcases, hair and shoes – and it occurred to him that what was happening to the animals could be seen as similar to what the Germans did to the Jewish population. The herding, housing, transportation, skin marking, secrecy and the discussions about what was the most humane way to kill all seemed to echo what had happened.  

Alex feels his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto helped to shape the way he became empathic with what animals go through in todays factory farms. There are the same concepts of living in abnormal conditions, of severe crowding, of never knowing how ling you are going to be able to live and then being killed violently. After the work at the slaughterhouse Alex was in a state of consternation.  He loved the USA but could now see it as a country doing despicable things to sentient beings. He felt very alone and didn’t have anyone he could share his concerns with but he read some of the work of by Isaac Bashevis Singer and realised at least one other person shared his concerns and fears.

Alex felt a little better but he suffered from survivor’s guilt. Why was he spared, how could he repay the debt and is there a lesson we can draw from the terrible tragedy that had befallen his people. His questions remained unanswered until he attended the World Vegetarian Congress in 1975 and found 1500 we shared his views. At that point he decided he was going to spend the rest of his life fighting all oppression, starting with the oppression of animals for food.

Although he approached vegetarism from a point of conditions, there are a number of other reasons to give up eating meat. A team from Alex’s organisation attended the COP 26 Conference last year where the air and water pollution from industrial agriculture and the health benefits to be gained from vegetarism were discussed in great detail.

Going forward Alex feels that the meat industry has realised that animal agriculture has no long term future and has aligned itself with the concept of plant based meat and dairy products and that this will help in changing peoples views of vegetarism. Many people embrace the idea of animal rights – they love their pets and animals they see as ‘cute’ - but don’t want to change their lifestyle or diet. If, driven by the meat producers, plant based foods are produced in large quantities at a price acceptable to consumers then the obstacle of lifestyle change will disappear.

Alex feels that even if a plant based diet becomes the norm there will still be a role for the movement. There is still the ideology so, although we may have stopped eating animals, there is still the questions of whether animals have rights, whether we have obligations towards them and how can we make things better for all sentient beings.

 You can find out more about Alex and his work at The Farm Animal Rights Movement or AlexHershaft.com Alex also writes a bi-weekly blog The Vegan Blog.org

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