^^I just knew it as a famous saying by him, it turns out it's from a short story, The Letter Writer: "They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."
While this is a character talking, Bashevis Singer was a very strong advocate of animal rights, so I think we can assume he felt this way himself. Anyway, even without the context, do you not see the parallels between the Holocaust and the way animals are treated? Not just the mass slaughter - I think what made the Holocaust different and more horrifying from all other cases of genocide was the fact that people were treated in the same horrible way we treat animals - experimented on, bodyparts used for products...
As shocking as that sounds, it is true. And what's more shocking is that those aren't monsters, evil people, they are just ordinary everyday people, the silent majority, if you will. Which really makes you think about 'the banality of evil' - that it really isn't an aberration, that it is there with us, ready to raise its ugly head whenever the opportunity arises.
