Holocaust vegetarian

[Guest guest]

From The Times

April 9, 2009

 

 

Holocaust vegetarian

 

 

A vegetarian conversion that began at Belsen

 

I am a vegetarian on moral (rather than dietetic) grounds and my

conversion began at Belsen.

 

About 20 years ago, my family was visiting the Anne Frank museum in

Amsterdam. We had descended the stairs from the utterly depressing sight

of the bookcase and the humiliating hole through which the Frank family

had been compelled to crawl like rats during their years of concealment.

Confronted by a photograph of a pile of gassed bodies about to be

bulldozed into a hole in the ground, our six-year-old daughter demanded

an explanation of what was happening.

 

There can be only one rationalisation for the capacity of humans to

treat others as animals. In their warped thinking, the spectrum that

ranged from the Aryan super-race to smallest living being was divided by

an arbitrary line of demarcation: on one side lay humanity and on the

other, animals --- a category that included, among others, Jews and

Gypsies. The line is arbitrary, because the taxonomy that determines

what is acceptable to kill to eat has no evident basis in logic. In

Britain, we eat sheep with impunity, but never serve horse. In Central

Asia, horse is fine, but pig is not.

 

Back then in that nondescript house on Prinsengracht, I decided that

these taxonomic anomalies were both unsupportable and unnecessary, and

resolved to eat nothing from the animal kingdom thereafter.

 

Twenty years later, that short journey from the Belsen victims' pile to

no longer drawing the line has done me no harm and has saved the

pointless death and suffering of countless animals.

 

Ken Olisa

 

Kingston upon Thames, Surrey