Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Jacob Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world.
Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from
witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of
Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and
the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized,
as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and
profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in
our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses.
Jacob Flaws is an assistant professor of history at Kean University.
We will be joined by Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls (University of Huddersfield) and Professor Jean-Marc Dreyfus (University of Manchester) to Chair this event.
This event is in partnership with the Centre of Archaeology at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Manchester.