Several individuals and groups have drawn direct comparisons between animal cruelty and the Holocaust. The analogies began soon after the end of World War II, when literary figures, many of them Holocaust survivors, Jewish or both, began to draw parallels between the treatment of animals by humans and the treatments of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy. The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare. Comparisons Perhaps the earliest use of the analogy comes from Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a German concentration camp survivor and journalist, who wrote in 1940 in his "Dachau Diaries" from inside the Dachau Concentration Camp that "I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures' suffering by virtue of my own". He further wrote, "I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale". Another Holocaust survivor who has written on the subject is Alex Hershaft, now a vegan activist, who also compared the treatment of livestock to the Holocaust. He has stated that "We're focusing on the victims rather than the cancer of oppression itself", and that "I noted with horror the striking similarities between what the Nazis did to my family and my people, and what we do to animals we raise for food: the branding or tattooing of serial numbers to identify victims, the use of cattle cars to transport victims to their death, the crowded housing of victims in wood crates, the arbitrary designation of who lives and who dies — the Christian lives, the Jew dies; the dog lives, the pig dies." Polish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, made the comparison in several of his stories. In the 1968 The Letter Writer, the protagonist says, "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." In The Penitent the protagonist says "when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi". J. M. Coetzee,