Historian exposes Treblinka death machine through testimony

More than 900 000 mostly Jewish people were murdered in Treblinka Death Camp, and there are no physical remnants of this hell hole. However, historian Jacob Flaws tells how he painted a picture of what the camp and its surrounds were like in his book, Spaces of Treblinka.

Author and assistant professor of history at Kean University, Flaws’ book was launched at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre on 17 February, where he explored the sights, smells, and sounds of one of what he describes as “the black holes of the Holocaust”.

Flaws said the three camps established under Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, were created exclusively to be places where Jewish people were sent to die. There was little to no chance of avoiding death at these camps.

This is why, he said, out of the one and a half million people murdered at all three camps, there were only 150 survivors.

In telling the story of what Treblinka was like, Flaws sought to get the voices of everyone who experienced the camp. This included Polish people who lived in the areas surrounding the camps, the Nazis who worked in the camp, as well as testimony from Jewish people in the camp.

Flaws found getting testimony of what happened inside the camp to be difficult as the majority of the people there were murdered. To create a realistic picture, he had to try and get a sense of what the space around Treblinka was like through those who survived as well as from those around the camp.

“When starting to research the camp, I got interested in spatial theory, the idea that a space is created by the people who inhabit the space,” he said. “So I needed to get the voices of everyone who interacted with the camp in one way or another to recreate this space in the most realistic way possible.”

Treblinka was built by the Nazis to be a clean, industrial killing facility where the mass murder of Jewish people was kept out of sight and out of mind, Flaws said.

Since the Nazis created the image of an efficient cleaning machine, and because the camp was destroyed by the end of the war, the camp itself was shrouded in secrecy so that nobody outside of it would know that 900 000 people would be murdered there. However, those around the camps couldn’t avoid what was happening.

“The Nazis wanted this human slaughterhouse to be represented as a sleek, streamlined building where there was no actual human killing,” said Flaws, “but the reality of what Treblinka was like is at odds with this.”

Survivors of the camp also tell an unsanitised version of events.

It was a case of hordes of Jewish people being kept in cattle cars and upon reaching their destination, immediately going into the fields by the camps and being shot and put into mass graves, which were eventually dug up and then burned. Or masses of people being sent to gas chambers, where their bodies would be burned to dispose of the evidence.

Flaws found that as he heard more and more diverse voices in his research, both survivors and people in surrounding areas, the Nazis’ image of Treblinka crumbled. It wasn’t a sanitised place but a place where people were sent to their death in the most inhumane and violent way possible.

Flaws said that to keep up the sanitised image, the Nazis commandeered a Jewish orchestra to play while others in the camp were being violently exterminated. This was done so that people in the surrounding areas wouldn’t be able to hear the gunfire, screams, and drone of digging machines, but rather the sound of beautiful classical music.

However, he said that for locals living in the area, the knowledge that they were near a death camp was unavoidable. Their days were populated by the sight of smoke and sounds of Jewish people screaming and gunshots. “One woman said that the sound of gunfire was so close that it would make the whole village run,” he said.

Similarly, local Poles living near the camp said that they couldn’t avoid the smell of burning bodies. “One witness I found said, ‘The smell alone of burning bodies, burning tens of thousands of bodies out in the open every day, was unavoidable. It squeezed through the homes, through the porous wooden walls, windows, and doors of the country houses of which we lived,’” Flaws said.

Similarly, Flaws found that even the Nazis who worked in the camps couldn’t handle the smell of the burning Jewish bodies, and that one commander at the camp doused his walls in perfume.

Treblinka was shrouded in secrecy as it was surrounded by two fences, one interlaced with pine leaves so that people couldn’t see through it.

“So, though people in surrounding areas could hear and smell what was happening in the camp, they couldn’t see inside,” he said, “This isolation created a space where the laws of morality no longer applied so they were able to do the unimaginable.”

Furthermore, though the Nazi soldiers did the killing, they would separate themselves as much as possible from the people they were killing and the reality of what they were doing. Flaws said that in the confines of the camp there was a petting zoo so that those involved could detach themselves from the killings.

No matter how much those who perpetrated the crimes against humanity in the camp tried to hide it, the truth is out, thanks to Flaws.