(JTA) — Arno Klarsfeld, the son of the well-known French Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, said on television that a lamb at a slaughterhouse is the same as a Jew arriving at the gas chamber.
Arno Klarsfeld, a 55-year-old lawyer and author, made the remark during an interview Wednesday on i24 news channel about his new book on animal welfare.
“For animals in the meat industry, there’s no God like there was no God for the Jewish families mercilessly murdered in the Holocaust. Singer was right: For some animals, life is an eternal Treblinka,” Klarsfeld wrote in “Souls and Animals.”
The Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was a vegetarian, wrote in a 1968 short story that “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka,” referencing the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.
On i24, Klarsfeld defended his assertion about Singer being right, which sparked controversy because many believe it insults the memory of the Holocaust’s victims. Critics also said it was philosophically inaccurate because the Nazis killed Jews out of hatred.
“If you become a lamb and arrive to a slaughterhouse with your mother, well, then you’re in the same situation that is the same as a Jewish mother who arrives with her child to a gas chamber,” Klarsfeld said.
He added that his father and mother, Beate, “refuse to see pictures from slaughterhouses when I try to show them.”
