Ep. 40- The Spatial History of Treblinka with Jacob Flaws

In this episode, I talked with Jacob Flaws about the spaces of Treblinka.  His work analyses this extermination camp from a spatial perspective, focusing on the physical and ideological boundaries of the camp.  His work shows that the fences of the camp did not contain the truth of its existence and he details the ways in which the local population from the surrounding area interacted with the Nazi killing process and its victims.

Jacob Flaws is an assistant professor of history at Kean University.

Flaws, Jacob. Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (2024)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.928)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Whitman Bourne. And today we're talking about, the Treblinka extermination camp. And I know we've talked about this before on the podcast. but this time we're talking about it from a different kind of angle, different kind of perspective. One that I really think is important and really valuable, which is kind of thinking about the camp in terms of, of space, of geography of, and of what that space means for all of the people.

that were involved in some way, or form with this particular place. And with me to talk about this is Jacob Flaws, who's just written a really, really good book on Tripolinka from this perspective. And so Jacob, thanks for coming on.

Jacob Flaws (00:47.392)
Thanks for having me.

Waitman Beorn (00:49.238)
Can you tell us how you got into or interested in this particular topic and then probably also, because we're going to get there eventually, how you got interested in coming at it from this particular approach?

Jacob Flaws (01:02.202)
So Treblinka was a space I was incredibly struck by when I visited for the first time. When you go to Treblinka today, there's a very moving memorial that's on the site. The death camp no longer exists. The Nazis tore it down in 1943. 900,000 people died there. And I was struck by that because I had just been at Auschwitz. I had just been at the camp at Majdanek and Dachau. And there you have physical structures. can...

see the fences, see the Arbite Mock Frye Gate, you can walk through the camp. It wasn't that way at Treblinka and I was very impacted still by the space and I just did not know why. And so the question that got me going was what was here? What was here 80 years ago if I was standing in this exact spot? And the memorial is great, it's very moving, but I wanted to just find out for myself why I was so impacted by that and got me down the road into spatial history. I thought I was...

just uniquely impacted by space. didn't realize that others had thought about this until I got home and started reading some of your own work. Also some of Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre, Yifu Tuan, a lot of spatial theory helped me have a framework to start thinking about, know, humans are impacted by the built environments, but also environments that no longer exist, spaces that no longer exist. And that we connect with those spaces for different reasons.

That's what really drew me to Treblinka. I wanted to understand how one of the most horrific mass killing sites that ever existed actually existed, what that was actually like 80 years ago.

Waitman Beorn (02:38.196)
Yeah, I mean, and I'm obviously, you know, a big fan of this approach as well. And I think you're right, because when you, you, when you visit your Blinket today, you know, it's, it's, you know, the signage isn't particularly great, you know, and it's, as you say, from a memorial commemoration perspective, you know, it's quite striking with the stones and everything else, but, you know, I'm, one of the people that always wants to know I'm standing here. What would, what would be near me? What would I be seeing? You know, what would.

What would this experience be like in a certain sense? And it's not there. It's really not there at any of the Reinhardt camps that exists. Belzec is the same way. And so we bore slightly less so. And so I think that's, you know, it's a question that, and it's a question also that I think visitors have, you know, whenever, mean, not just for, not just at concentration camps, but whenever you visit any place,

You want to know where am I standing in relation to the other things there and what would have been there at the time and what would have looked like and all of that kind of stuff. And if you don't get that, I think it makes it more difficult to sort of imbibe the history, I suppose. Can you tell us one of the things I was curious about and we'll get into the sort of the maybe I'm doing this bit backwards, but.

How did you do this? Because you have a lot of testimony from people, Polish people in other parts of the local regional area. How did you go about doing the research for this?

Jacob Flaws (04:24.346)
So that was a challenge that I initially encountered. sat down originally when I was thinking up this for my dissertation version of the project with my advisor, the late David Schneer. And he was wonderful in that he said, here's all the things you're gonna have to do if you wanna answer the question of not only what was here, but like you mentioned, that was another question I had too, was this idea of who knew what, who heard what, who smelled what. And I said, I have the German voice. They kept pretty.

pretty good records of the camp. And I have the Jewish survivors that we know of, I have their voice. I don't know if I have the Polish voices. I can see them in the Jewish perspective. They would talk about being in Treblinka and seeing the Poles out in the fields. And you knew they were there. And I didn't know if I could find them. And he said, you may not. said, but that's the voice you need. You need their perspective. And so the first thing I did was I went to Claude Landsman's Shoah and

I said, what didn't make it into your film? I didn't ask him, obviously he's not around, but US Holocaust Museum has a lot of those outtakes. And I started to read the transcripts of the film. He interviewed people who live nearby and this was only 20, 30 years after the camp. And he was asking the questions I would have asked. It was almost as if I'm thankful for Claude Lansman for doing that, but it's almost as if I was teleported in his mind telling him, here, ask him this, ask him this.

And so the film helped. And then I started to look at those outtakes and there's a lot more where he interviewed other people who talked about what they heard, what they smelled, what they saw. And what's interesting about that perspective is they almost always describe the setting regardless of their own personal bias for their testimony. And this was true when I found other Polish voices, which was in the Jewish Historical Institute, the Polish commission after the war.

went out and interviewed people to establish evidence of what happened at places like Treblinka. Those testimonies made it and were saved in the Jewish Historical Institute and some other archives in Poland. And almost to a person, regardless of if they're trying to say, I helped Jews, I didn't do anything bad, I didn't profit from this situation, they have a slant. Regardless of that slant though, they're remarkably consistent with the way they describe the setting.

Jacob Flaws (06:50.522)
And there almost always is this need to tell the story in addition to whatever angle they're trying to present. And so that was key in finding that Polish voice. And once I had those three, I knew I had to put them together. And I started mapping it. I went to an ArcGIS page and I started just plotting, hey, this person lived four kilometers in a straight line away from the camp. And this is what they smelled. So I color coded that purple for smell. And this is what they heard at six kilometers. I color coded that yellow.

Waitman Beorn (07:12.714)
Mm.

Jacob Flaws (07:19.62)
And as I started seeing this play out, I started to realize you have the camp itself, but it impacted the world in wider concentrical swaths as the further I went out. And that was the basis. Once I hit that, I started to see the project coming together. And more importantly for me, I started to answer the question, you know, how far did this go? Who, who saw things from 20 miles away? Could they see the smoke on the horizon? You know, and that was really eyeopening for myself.

Waitman Beorn (07:47.158)
And one of things that you're bringing up here that I think is really important and well, really two things, and I want to flag them for our listeners who may be, you know, early career researchers or graduate students. One of them is that digital humanities is doable. You don't need to be a sort of computer wizard or, you know, have a massive experience in coding. You know, it's an accessible thing. I mean, it sounds like you sort of picked it up because you needed to know it.

you know, and I think it's important to highlight that number one. And also the second piece is that.

In your project, you have discovered perhaps questions in the process of visualizing the things that you were, that you were finding in the archives. Is that, is that fair?

Jacob Flaws (08:40.408)
I think you're absolutely spot on. know, this was something that, the ArcGIS particularly, I'm not computer super savvy. I get around, but it was one of those things that was so easy to use and it started to build on other things. And I started to, you know, have to learn other, aspects of not just history, but you know, the body, how do we perceive sight, smell, sounds? What does that mean for how we visualize what happens and how we make memories and how we become witnesses?

I had to learn about environmental studies. How does the wind, how does the different temperatures, how does the weather impact smell, sight and sound? But also how does it impact the survivor who enters the forest to try to live off of that natural landscape? so, yeah, trying to visualize history as something that happened in the past to me, I started to realize it was 3D, it was vivid, it was multi-sensorial. It's a lot like the world we live in today and that's because it was, it was this idea that

That's how humans form understanding of their lived environments. And it was true 80 years ago, just like it is now. And that was the bridge for me that really helped open the project wide open. And I'm glad that you mentioned that, you know, it is so easy to get into some of these digital technologies and start mapping the project. I knew I had something. I didn't know what it was until I could see it visually on that page and it just clicked.

Waitman Beorn (10:04.31)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always tell people that the only skill that you really need to start a digital or a mapping element to a project is the ability to do a Google spreadsheet. Cause if you can create a Google spreadsheet with categories that may include like some kind of relational or location data, that's it. You know, that's all you need. mean, I did a...

It's a little bit off the topic, but I did a social network analysis of the perpetrators for the Unovska camp by basically finding all the times and places they were mentioned or they mentioned that they were out of place just to see where they overlapped. ultimately I found some really cool things that these guys had, for example, moved throughout the system together and they had served together at various places before they got to the camp. But the point is all I needed to do that

was be able to create a spreadsheet with, you know, categories of like when this person was here, where they were and that kind of thing. And again, I really want to impress to listeners, particularly those that may be in the, in the grad student community, you know, it's digital humanities is not about the technology. It's about thinking about what would happen if I mapped this or what would happen if I modeled this or, or whatever.

Right. And so I'll be quiet. I'll get off, I'll get off my soap box there in terms of like, but I, you know, I think it's important to sort of be a digital proselytizer and sort of say, look, you know, this is, and it's not, it's not fricking generative AI, which I just, I want to kill myself about generally generated. I mean, this is like the good, the good witch of, of technology, right.

Jacob Flaws (11:43.382)
You

Jacob Flaws (11:51.746)
It really is, it really is.

Waitman Beorn (11:53.71)
yeah. So anyway, I'll be quiet about that, but let me, so let's move into the, into your, your project a little bit. you identify a bunch of different spaces, and different ways in which people interacted, can talk a little bit about, about how you chose the different spaces of analysis. And then we'll get into sort of each one of them in a little more detailed, but you know, this is kind of your, your organizing approach.

It's not a chronological history. You know, it's, more of a sort of thematic history based on space, right?

Jacob Flaws (12:32.588)
Absolutely. And it goes back to what you were just saying. I didn't realize how I was going to organize this until I started to put it on ArcGIS and started looking at the data. That's when I realized I was originally going to do it by Jewish survival space versus perpetrator space versus Polish witnessing space, but that wasn't very efficient. And it also runs anathema to what I came to find is true of space, which is the more voices you actually put together.

you create what's called the contemporaneous plurality. It's this massive word, but it just means what actually happened from all perspectives at the time. And you have to put them all together to do that. So for the book, what I did was I had to start with the German space, the Nazi space of creating Treblinka. We have to recognize that they're the ones who brought this horrific thing into existence. so I wanted to set up the space. What did they intend with this space? How did they imagine it? What did it?

phantasmagoric goal did it serve in the Third Reich, Thousand Year Reich that they envisioned? How did they divide the space and separate it to make it do that? And so I very much start with this Nazi imagery, but as I start to add other elements, and so I look at things like, you know, the space of life and death for the Jews who are brought there, how they experienced this space, the sensory space that the sight, smells and sounds that poured out, the trains that brought people there and how that extended the space.

What happened as the project goes on is that original space with the Nazis intended gets eroded away. And that's really an important tension that works throughout the book because I was going through the archive very early on and I found this pamphlet and I reproduced the image in the book, but the title is Das Menschen Schlachthaus Treblinka, The Human Slaughterhouse Treblinka. And it shows

this clean, sleek, industrialized factory sitting on top of a hill where the killing is supposedly done, but you don't see it. It's very clean. It's very efficient and modern. And I started to realize on this that that's what the perpetrators wanted at Treblinka. That's why they shifted from mass shootings, which preceded it to the Reinhard camps. They wanted to create somehow a clean space where humans were.

Jacob Flaws (14:53.562)
and no one saw it, it wasn't painful, it just, they disappeared. And that was the image to a T. And this image came from after the war. And I started to realize that imagery still persists in our modern world for good reason. I mean, we're squeamish, we don't wanna look behind the curtain, it's graphic, it's some of the stuff I have to write about is pretty tough. But it's important to do because as you present those additional spaces and you realize this wasn't that, this wasn't clean, this wasn't...

safe and happy space where people just disappeared and death was painless. This was some of the most horrific things that I've ever encountered. And that is the human reality. And we can't use the perpetrator language, even if it makes us less squeamish. We have to look behind the curtain and say, this is what humans do to other humans in genocide. This is what happens. And so as the book progresses through the subsequent spaces and you see how wide and far this is witnessed in the local world, you start to realize that

the Nazi perspective of what they wanted at Treblinka was blown up from pretty much day one.

Waitman Beorn (15:59.062)
And then this is a really good point. And it's something that when I was talking with Chad Gibbs about this in the previous episode, we sort of said that somebody should write a book of like the top 10 persistent myths about the Holocaust. And one of them is this idea that the Reinhard camps were this kind of sterile assembly line operation where

You know, it went completely smoothly and you know, there were no, there were hitches and it was, I'm using air quotes here, humane and you know, all this kind of stuff. And you're absolutely right. Now this, this is, this is the ideal, suppose, not, not in the, in the, the concern of the victims, of course, but for the concern of the, of the perpetrators. But the reality of it is that, you know, it was, it was a giant mess in most of these places.

You know, and we talked about with Chad and I, you know, also when, you know, when Strongle shows up, the second commandant, she's up to to Blinka. It's a complete disaster. mean, you know, he's, and he says this, he's like, you know, there was money and papers all over the place and bodies. And it was just, it was a complete, you know, it was a complete shit show for lack of a better word, you know, and.

And that's something that we know, right, as Holocaust scholars, but I think the general public, again, still has this idea of a sort of clean and pure process. mean, you see this even in Schindler's List, right, when they end up in Auschwitz and, you know, the people that we're following don't go to the gas chambers, but they shows very briefly sort of these lines of people kind of very slowly and calmly, you know, walking into the gas chambers and

And you're right that that is, that is what the perpetrators, a, that was their idea when they were doing it. But also, think even more sort of, subversively, that's the idea they want to portray after the war. As if, you know, somehow it wasn't quite that bad that they killed all these people because at least they did it in sort of this very humane and thoughtful way. and so again, I think it's what you've done. I think one of the themes that runs through

Waitman Beorn (18:21.526)
through your book and we'll talk about all of these in more detail, but is this idea of if we think about sort of Treblinka as being at the center of a ripple and the fact of Treblinka as a horrible place of death sort of ripples out much more widely than we might have thought about, if that makes sense.

Jacob Flaws (18:46.188)
Absolutely. It's a great way to contextualize the whole project's perspective here. That's really what I got out of it also. you you mentioned the perpetrators in Stongle. I think that was really telling for me was that they're not even immune to the actual realities of these places. He's brought in, he's, you know, he understands the mission here is supposed to create this somehow clean, sanitized, sterile environment. But he shows up and it's not that way and he tries to make it that way. But even as they're

burning the bodies to erase the evidence, which is one of his initiatives. He has to perfume the walls and carpets of his living quarters because he can smell it. And it's at odds with what he wants Treblinka to be. He wants to block out the actual reality. And so once I started to realize that this wasn't just the perpetrators and the witnesses, and that this was actually the killers noticing this too, that was really impactful.

Waitman Beorn (19:45.952)
So speaking of the killers, what is the ideological space? What are the Nazis trying to build at Tripolinka? And we should be clear, this is actually Tripolinka 2. There is a Tripolinka 1 slave labor camp that is literally just down the road about half a mile or so. But what are they trying to accomplish at Tripolinka, the extermination center?

Jacob Flaws (20:12.292)
So Treblinka, in my opinion, is supposed to be the dark heart of the Holocaust in some extent. I think that with the Operation Reinhardt camps, which are named after Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, you have Belzec, you have Sobibor, and you have Treblinka. And Treblinka is really supposed to be the paragon of mass death, the mass killing. The other two camps are also horrific places. They're places where people...

aren't really selected to work for the Third Reich. They are all sent to death except for a small group that's kept alive to run the camp's machinery so the Nazis don't have to do the dirtier work. But at Treblinka, they really want to perfect this death camp. And the best analogy that I can come up with as I was doing this research is it's almost as if they perceived the need for these type of Treblinka's on the horizons of their Thousand Year Reich.

if this would have lasted a thousand years, it would have probably been like animal slaughterhouses is how they envisioned it. That they would have these places at the edges of society that were somewhat hidden, but you knew they were there. You could smell them just like if the wind's blowing a certain way, you can smell the Tyson plant when I grew up in Iowa and you knew they were making chicken. This was for the murder needs of the Reich. And in some twisted, horrific, logically driven way, that is the...

rationality that went into the development of the camp. They tried to separate it, isolate it from the outside world, even though they believed this needed to be done for the Thousand Year Reich to cleanse the frontier that they were going to build this empire on, they still felt the need to hide it. And they, even though created this space where Western morality wouldn't make sense, they were very worried about the German people not being ready to understand it yet. And so when you look at Treblinka and the

The maps we have, the great archeological studies that have been done by Caroline Sturdy-Coles and others, you show that there's separation of the outside world through a number of fences, fences that are impenetrable, but also are visual barriers. They're 15, 20 feet high. They put pine branches in there. They replace those pine branches constantly to prevent any sight into these camps, because even though they feel like they're doing

Jacob Flaws (22:33.71)
the good deeds for the thousand year Reich, they're very much worried about the German people hearing about this and not understanding the necessity of it. So that's the ideological space. I really believe it's the word I use is the phantasmagoric perception of what a death producing space would be for a thousand year Reich.

Waitman Beorn (22:53.498)
And yet when we move into this sort of moving to the second part, but when we when we look at the actual spaces, you they have this. They they they're trying to. Somehow confine various aspects of the process geographically, like delineating spatially, this is the place where this thing takes place, and this is the place where we have our zoo.

and where we have our sort of SS living areas. And you talk about this in terms of sort of behavioral space, which I think is a really cool way of thinking about the impact. Because one of the things that I certainly argue, because full disclosure, I was a graduate student with Ann Kelly Knowles and Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano and Paul Jasko at the very beginning. And I had the same kind of, you know,

road to Damascus moment where I realized like, wow, this is a really cool way of thinking about things in terms of space, right? And it's sort of impacted the way that I've worked since. And I'm entirely grateful to those folks for sort of doing this. But one of the things that I think comes out of that and something that you I think touch on as well, and I want to hear you talk about sort of how this relates to the behavioral space. But.

Is that space, location is not neutral, right? In the sense that it doesn't, I don't mean it's determinative in the sense that it like sort of makes things happen, but it makes some things easier to happen than others and sets the stage. it plays, it has a role to play in the way that history unfolds. Just at the macro level of where railroads are that impacts where Triplinka is. It's not, you know, that kind of thing.

And so it's, it's, it's the space itself impacts how perpetrators behave. And that can be, that can be a, you know, literal or imagined, you know, way in which they behave. So this is something you talk about. can you, can you talk us through a little bit about behavioral space and how the various, you know, locations in the camp change behaviors?

Jacob Flaws (25:16.282)
So Treblinka becomes a kind of performative space almost for some of these individuals who are perpetrators who are sent there, who maybe during the T4 euthanasia program where the Nazis killed people with disabilities, starting from the start of the war into 1941 continued on. Those individuals are sent to the Reinhard camps. And what's interesting at Treblinka is several of those individuals who are fairly low ranking members of the T4 program. may have been

clerks or nurses or kitchen staff, they're elevated as they're sent out to the East into these camps. And some of them are given charge of the entire what's called the Totenlager, the killing space where the actual gas chambers and the burning bodies and the burial pits where the most horrific parts of the camp are, they're given charge of that. And they're said you're kind of the lord, the master of that space.

And what's interesting is almost to a person, these T4 members enter that space and play that role because they've been given a spatial setting where they're now the masters over life or death. And you see that in several of the cases. This has been shown in a number of different areas, but at Treblinka, it's so clear that by isolating the camp space from the rest of the world, which they did, the Germans did because they wanted it to be secret.

it actually served another purpose as it was doubly isolated, where it became beholden to its own morality. The idea that, and I think Hannah Arendt is her works coming back around as it always does, know, origins of totalitarianism. She writes about how in those types of spaces, where the laws of Western morality that say thou shall not kill, that gets suspended in these new spatial creations, where instead of saying thou shall not kill, now you say,

thou shall kill if it's in service of the thousand year rike. And instead of being persecuted for mass murder or brutality or treating people horribly, that's encouraged, that's welcomed. People can have that not only for career advancement, but some of the post-war trials that I was reading into of some of these individuals who ran the different interior spaces of the camp, they even noted this. The judges said,

Jacob Flaws (27:39.416)
This is the first time these people have had this type of authority their whole lives. And Treblinka essentially, they don't go this far, but I do. I say Treblinka basically gives them the space to become that, to exercise that authority, to be in a position where they could decide who lived and died, to live like kings and to suspend their morality. And what I found was, that was the big question for me was, where did the Nazis go from projecting this space to actually living there and doing these horrible things is,

the space affected their behavior. Within that space, they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. And they reveled in that. You see this really well too, in Geto Serenis, Into That Darkness, where she talks about some of the oddities that she found with Stongel and some of the other T4 men who would go to a place like Sobibor or Treblinka or Belzec and kill people all day and then come back and go on vacation.

Waitman Beorn (28:31.862)
Thank

Jacob Flaws (28:37.236)
with their wives and be different people on the outside. The similar thing happens at Treblinka. It very much impacts behavior. And I think that's because humans do that in all of our spaces. It may not be that extreme, but it can be.

Waitman Beorn (28:51.042)
One of the things I think is interesting, this is it, you touch on this in Triple Link as well, and I've seen it elsewhere, is that particularly in these post-war trials, the perpetrators, and this is another ad for why space is important. They always begin a discussion by saying where they were. Either I was 500 meters from the killing site or I was in the cordon around the village or I was

in the building office at Treblinka or at Auschwitz or whatever, but it's always where were they? And it's interesting because when you talk about even at a place like Treblinka, which is, you sort of suggested already at the epicenter of sort of Nazi mass killing, there are places that are seen as worse than others. so, know, and I'm curious to talk about this. Stango, for example, will say,

I never went into, what was it? camp two at Trip Link. Is that the, is that the death that sort of where the gas chambers are? You know, so there's this, yeah, this idea that like, if I don't tread physically tread upon this space, I am somehow not responsible for what's happening in the overall place, which I think is, is crazy, but it also makes a lot of sense from a sort of human nature perspective.

Jacob Flaws (29:57.859)
Yeah, the totes.

Jacob Flaws (30:20.344)
Yeah, and it also not only, I mean, you're spot on and you see this again and again where they say, well, I was only part of that or the worst things happened when I wasn't in that space. They all mentioned the vacations they took or the sick leave and well, anything that was disorderly or not clean killing only happened when I wasn't in that space. But it also explains to, I think, the interesting, surreal kind of juxtapositions the Nazis create in this space where

you know, literally two to 300 meters from the gas chambers and the burning bodies. You have a zoo, you have a garden, you have a tailor, you have a place that Franz Stangl talks about being a special place. They really tried to create within Treblinka, it happened to be the Nazi living quarter part of the camp. They tried to make it some type of oasis, despite the fact that you have smell sites and sounds pouring in there. But I think it goes back to the space being behavioral and that

they try to make it into something based on how they want to perceive that space. And that matters. It's construct, but it absolutely matters because it creates what Treblinka looked like on the Nazi quarter side of things, which is wild. had like, you know, a place where you could go and visit a petting zoo and actually go visit animals on your time off and pretend like nothing's happening next, literally right next door to you.

Waitman Beorn (31:43.566)
Yeah, and I think one of things to add on to this because you're in pursuit of this in this book. I was certainly in pursuit of this in mine, which is Saul Friedland's challenge for us to create an integrated history, a history of the Holocaust that precisely doesn't do what you smartly decided not to do in your organization of the book, which is not to have a Jewish chapter.

a German chapter and like a bystander chapter, right? It is to do precisely what you have done, is, which is integrate all of those groups together because these spaces, none of these spaces really are hermetically sealed where, you know, where you don't have the other groups of, if you want to use the sort of perpetrator, victim, bystander paradigm, you don't have a space that those people are simply for most instances, completely excluded from.

And so when we come back to this idea of behavioral spaces, can you talk a little about how that impacts the prisoners, how that impacts the Jewish people in Treblinka and how they make sense of these sort of artificial delineations made by the Nazis in constructing the camp?

Jacob Flaws (32:57.732)
Sure, so, you know, sadly, the vast majority of Jewish experiences of Treblinka are very short. vast majority of them are murdered within about an hour max of arriving there. And so they encounter the spaces that the Nazis set up. And so I think you're spot on. have that dynamic perspective. It's not just Jewish perspective. It's what the local Germans have, or the Germans have set the space up as that matters. So they see

The Nazis have taken great pains to set this up to look like a fake train station. And they've painted on the clock that says the time and they put fake ticket windows. They sell the narrative that this is a bathing establishment. You're being deloused before you're sent to resettlement in the East. And here's a ticket to get your clothes back after you get that delousing shower, keep your shoes together, tie them together. And...

even when they get to the end of the Himmelsstrasse, which is the tube that takes them down to the death camp or the gas chambers, the gas chambers look like a bathing establishment. They have flowers that are meticulously cared for on the outside because if someone wants to buy this narrative, it's presented for them. Increasingly, they know that this is all a facade and the Jews catch onto this pretty quickly, especially when they see odd sites like.

piles of clothes stacked 60 feet high over the fences. Some say, well, hey, that's gonna be our work. It's a work camp. Others say, well, what happened to the people wearing those clothes? And so this facade starts to crumble. And so as these Jews are heading towards their deaths, many start to accept that that's going to happen. They start to understand that's going to happen, but that's their spatial experience. It's this odd juxtaposition of facade of lying, of deceit.

you know, and there's not there's not many redeeming qualities for the Jews who are murdered there in what the spatial narrative they're being told is the ones who survive who are selected to survive, I should say the ones who are kept alive to run the gas chambers, they're killed every three, four weeks as well. They don't know that initially upon being selected. Their experience is also pretty traumatic, at least for the most part. They have to work amongst.

Jacob Flaws (35:17.946)
horrific spaces. They have to carry the bodies out of the gas chambers. They have to unearth them. They have to burn them. They have to sort the belongings sometimes of their family members and send them back out to the Third Reich before they're killed themselves. And so, you know, this is a space of life and death. And those Jews who are able to escape from that work contingent, the ones who later revolt, who actually fight back, I think is such a powerful message of how people can, you know, find

hope can find small, small fragments of life, even in a space where death is overwhelming and that's the goal.

Waitman Beorn (35:56.692)
And it's something that's interesting too, for the prisoners there of, and again, I'm thinking, I'm getting out down into the weeds a bit in terms of the details, but the places that you could pass in and out of, you know, which, which depends on who you are. like Germans could pass in and out of, of the death camp portion of Treblinka. but if you were a prisoner, even one of the prisoners,

selected to temporarily live in the camp and do some, some form of task. If you maybe accidentally or whatever, if you get, if you enter, if you cross the threshold into the area where the gas chambers are for almost 99.9 % of those people, you're just, it's like, it's like going to heaven or hell that you can't, there's no coming back from it. Like you're, you are therefore dead. mean, you're, you're, and so I think that's a really powerful.

testimony to sort of space, right? And sort of the value of it or the impact it has.

Jacob Flaws (37:03.962)
And the survivors often mention this, the Jewish survivors of, you know, we might have been 70 kilometers or 70 meters away, which is very close, you know, several hundred feet from from Treblinka to which was the there was the term they used for the killing portion of Treblinka to which was the camp. And they said it might as well have been Australia. It was a gap that you did not cross unless I mean, there was a few people who could traverse the space, but they were very, very, very select few.

Waitman Beorn (37:21.173)
Right.

Jacob Flaws (37:33.144)
Like Yonkel Virenik is one who we know is because he's a carpenter, he's able to move through some different spaces. But for the most part, you stayed in the space and it was even though physically close by and this is where the behavior and the projection of space comes into play again, it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Because if you cross that threshold, you did not.

Waitman Beorn (37:52.906)
Well, and let's, let's, let's push this a little bit because I think one of things that your, that your research, your project does so well is deal with the so-called bystanders and, their interactions with, the people who, who lived and worked in Auschwitz in Treblinka. Right. And that's, that's both Jews and Nazis. And of course,

This is, think, one of the major, one of the biggest challenges for people that work on the Holocaust because by their very nature, a bystander doesn't tend to leave the same kinds of historical records that the perpetrators do, whether of their own volition or through a trial or whatever, or the survivors or the victims through testimony, that kind of stuff. And I think one of things that you're

yearbook does so well is to sort of begin to lay out specifically this. And so I wanted to spend some time talking about this part of it because I think it's really important. Can you talk about some of the ways in which the local Polish population interacts with both Jews and Germans at Treblinka?

Jacob Flaws (39:14.458)
So the local Polish population plays such a critical role in this because they're the people who, that's their space before the war. It's not like they chose for the Nazis to plop this death camp down next door and then they're forced to live next to it for 18 months or two years or whatever that's actually around for. And so in some ways, I often put this in my own personal perspective of thinking.

you that's their home space. And you think about spaces of home as being some of the most intimate, but some of the safest spaces that you have in your life, where you can be unquestionably you, you have intimate, happy moments, sad moments, vulnerable moments, safe moments, all within that kind of protected space. And all of a sudden you have this death camp next door. And so from a very basic level, this is a challenge to their own understandings of what it means to be in home.

next to a place that's projecting sights and smells and sounds and that stuff increasingly comes into their home spaces. There's so many testimonies out there about shutting the smoke out and being unable to, how it creeps into the windows and the cracks and the doors. The smells are the same way, but then the people start coming and that's the Jewish escapees. And we know at Treblinka, thanks to, I start to do some of this, but I know Chad's doing a lot of this, but

A lot of other research shows the number of people escaping is probably a bit higher than we probably previously estimated. Because the camp, the fences aren't electrified, Jews can escape, they're often re-caught. But we know there's a steady stream even before the revolt of Jews entering the local Polish world. And they interact with Poles in all sorts of ways. The Poles might be out working their farms, tending their sheep.

And you might have a Jewish survivor who now is coming across your field simply because they're escaping from the death camp that's now next to you. You never would have had those interactions if not for the space of Treblinka being where it was. And the same thing happens with, you know, a Jew showing up at the middle of the night in your back door, knocking on your door, asking for food or shelter, whatever it may be. That interaction might go a number of different ways. you know, I, I,

Jacob Flaws (41:27.416)
I do talk about that, but that's not really the focus of the book itself is, yeah, some helped, some hurt, some were indifferent. That's just the facts of all cases of occupation. But the reality is those interactions only happened because of the spatial juxtapositions that existed. And they're completely random for a large chunk of them. Most of these Jews don't know where they're at. They don't know where they're going. And they just know they need to get away from Treblinka.

that it determines they may show up at some random person's house completely at chance. And so in a way, the Jewish escapees create, I like to say it's kind of these widely varying vectors that come out of the camp in all sorts of different ways that determine life or death, usually for the Polish person as well as the Jewish survivor. And I think that's underappreciated in the literature because...

We love categorizations and they make sense. We, you know, bystanders, perpetrators, victims, but they're almost very fluid, especially in a case like Treblinka, because the polls themselves are also under the Nazi gun. They're being colonized. There are, you know, it is a death penalty if you're caught hiding a Jew, usually not just for yourself, but for your entire family. so not that I'm apologizing for polls who, you know, hurt Jews or

turn them over, but I think you have to take that on a case by case basis. And you also have to understand the spatial ramifications those poles are under before you start that judgment process of these poles have, they no longer have sovereignty even of their own homes. Germans can come in whenever they want, search and find whatever they want to. And so there's very real limitations that are imposed on them for what they feel like they can do. And so that's the spatial world that's

You know, love Primo Levi's gray zone. He talks about that existing in Auschwitz where morality is kind of flipped upside down and the right thing is no longer the right thing. It's actually the wrong thing is the right thing you should do. I think that exists and I argue this that that exists around Treblinka as well and probably the other death camps and probably for most of occupied Europe that's being colonized where the wrong thing is rewarded. You know, you're given food, you're given money, you're given clothing if you turn in a Jewish person instead of helping them. And so

Jacob Flaws (43:49.41)
That is the gray zone that exists for all parties in the spaces around Treblinka.

Waitman Beorn (43:54.646)
And I think again, one of the things that's so striking about, about your mapping, which is interestingly the mapping, remains all behind the scenes hadn't really thought about it until you mentioned it. Like you didn't include any maps of like it, you know, of, of, of this, which is fine, you know, because I think it actually that that's that's a good sort of lesson too, which is that sometimes we just use these.

digital humanities tools to help us formulate an argument. And we don't have to see it. Right. But in my head, you for example, I want you to talk about this too. The rail the rail lines open up another space of interaction between both individuals, Jews and Poles, but also

the Holocaust or the final solution and its factual existence and polls, right? And one of the things that, again, I found really interesting that you make the argument, I think that these are not isolated incidents, you know, that if you live along the rail line or in one of these small villages,

You know, you, you may actually encounter, encounter Jews escaping more than once, you know, because, you know, you're, happen to be living right next to the, to the source as it were. But the rail line stuff was really, can you talk, can you talk a little about, about how the rail line also opens up? mean, in my head, I'm imagining a map that sort of is, is kind of like, you know, a highlighted area along the rail lines that include that goes up to Treblinka, which is also a highlighted area.

know, can you talk a little bit about this rail corridor and how that also lends itself to these kinds of interactions?

Jacob Flaws (46:02.136)
It really struck me that I grew up in a town where it was a small town in the Midwest and, you know, train would come through three times a day and you heard it and you could sometimes see it, right? and, but it was freely regular. You got used to it, especially that 11 o'clock one. Cause you're trying to get sleep at least, you know, when I was younger and it dawned on me that as I started charting some of the railway interactions on this map that I was creating in the background, I started to realize that you didn't have to live next to Treblinka to witness something related to it.

That simply people who probably were used to the sounds of regular freight traffic in their backyards Because they lived on a railway line they had in their backyard or nearby They probably got really used to that just like I did as we all do in our modern world They heard it chugging by they knew that was the midnight train or the 6 a.m. Train That changes at a certain point when the Nazis start using those same railway lines To send Jews to their deaths and they do so in horrific ways their cattle cars themselves

are microcosms of the camps. They're horrific boxes of death where you have 200 people crammed into a space meant for 40 soldiers. This is overcrowded. It's hot, especially at the start in August and September, October, when the first deportations happened. There's no water. It's cramped. People are going to the bath. I mean, these are sensory bombs in themselves that are moving through people's backyards. A lot of people die en route, so they become kind of rolling coffins to some extent.

All that sensory box is moving through someone's backyard, all along the railway tracks. In addition, you have Jews trying to jump out and some of them are successful and they show up at people's doors. And the only reason they're showing up at that person's doors, that's where they landed when they jumped out of the train. It's totally random to some extent, aside from the fact that it follows the railway corridors. And increasingly they don't.

survive. And so that means these local polls come out and instead of seeing maybe junk that's dropped off of regular trains, they see human bodies. This is a change for what they're used to in seeing normal railway traffic. And so I chart them for Treblinka. And to your point, you know, sometimes you don't want to see how the sausage gets made, right? Because in the background, you know, I'm charting this and I actually draw, you know, one kilometer wide swaths on my ArcGIS around each train track.

Jacob Flaws (48:25.08)
that serves Treblinka and I started dotting where the individual interactions happen, where I have that information. And it starts to tell a story. And it started to tell me that this is not only true of Treblinka. If you chart the different railway tracks that lead to it, you have lots of witnesses who witnessed trains, who may be interacted with Jews, whose life or own life and deaths got caught up in this. This is probably true all throughout occupied Europe, especially with the Reinhard camps, but probably other places where deportations happen.

that hasn't been explored. And I hope that my methodology here with Treblinka shows that these camps don't just affect their local environments, but they have these tentacles that reach far, far beyond.

Waitman Beorn (49:05.524)
Well, think it definitely, I mean, it definitely does. mean, you know, one of the things that's kind of analogous is obviously I just finished this book on Janowska and they go to Belzec. But there are there are people who have jumped off the train so many times that they're called parachutists because they've like they've done this like repeatedly, like they've gotten rounded up, put in a train to Belzec, jumped off the train.

Made it back to Lviv, been rounded up again, put on the train to Belzec, jumped off the train. And so, you know, and those people that survived multiple times, and so people are surviving multiple times, then clearly people are not surviving even more. Right. And I think, I think you're absolutely right that this is, this is an unstudied, in a certain sense, unstudied element of interaction, you know, with these people that are, you know,

jumping off of the train along these corridors, right? That are geographically constrained. And one of the things that I think you showed that's really interesting that I think would be interesting for our listeners is the fact that poles get tasked with basically cleaning up the bodies along these rail lines.

Jacob Flaws (50:21.464)
Yeah, you know, this is something we think about with archaeology a lot of times, but we don't apply it to normal everyday spaces. And there are a lot of normal everyday spaces throughout Europe that still exist today, many of them that were used in dark ways in the Holocaust. Train stations, train lines being one of those. And I had one Polish witness who said the entire railway is a grave that essentially Jewish lives ended along those railway lines and they get buried.

either next to the railway lines or in local Polish cemeteries, largely based on where they landed when they jumped. And so their final resting places, their physical remnants, still are markers of the spatial aspects of the Holocaust.

Waitman Beorn (51:03.274)
Yeah. I mean, and again, it's, also a Testament. As you point out there, it's a Testament to, resistance, you know, in a certain sense that, know, these people are continuing to try to escape, you know, to the extent that, you know, you have to have, you know, details going up and down the railway lines, burying the bodies repeatedly and consistently. and then you have these examples that you talk about of, you know, trains passing through stations and.

Poles and Germans, know, seeing the trains there, seeing the people there, which again, you know, gives the lie in a certain sense to what was known and what wasn't known. Right.

Jacob Flaws (51:47.596)
Absolutely. And I was fortunate to be able to expand this research to the other Reinhardt camps recently in a special issue of the Journal of Transport History with Simone Gigliotti. And I applied it to Belgette's and Sobibor as well and found the same thing. And it was local railway stations where, you know, this is witnessing. This is local polls who maybe they only see the trains passing through, or maybe they, you know, there's this incredible story I found of women getting off a train from Western Europe.

and they weren't packed into cattle cars. They were well dressed and they were stopped and used the restroom and powdered their faces. And the Polish person who witnessed this comments that their end is in the gas chambers every bit as much as the Warsaw Jewish person who's packed into a cattle car. It's very shocking, but it almost invokes the normality of train travel. And it just reconceptualizes how normal spaces, normal modes of transportation become weaponized in genocidal regimes.

Waitman Beorn (52:41.11)
And I think, you know, one of the things that I want to now touch on, and I don't know if you, I don't know you follow this, I don't know how like, how on Twitter you are. but there was a woman who just got her PhD from Cambridge and her dissertation was about smell in, in literature, and how smell and literature is used to delineate sort of racial inferiority.

Anyway, it is one of those things where the sort of far right went nuts on like, look how woke and stupid academia is. you know, and, and she went mega super viral with this. and of course there were lots of scholars out there saying, well, smell is actually really, really important. mean, it's like, it's something that, you know, is a, is a fact of life and it does have meaning. And, and, I bring that up because it, you do precisely this.

and I really wanted to spend some time talking about the chapter on sensory spaces, because again, it's, this, you know, when I was reading the book in my head, I was seeing these sort of overlapping circles of different colors that sort of are the, the, the extent to which people at different distances, you know,

interacted with the camp. Can you talk about some of these, some of the sensory ways in which locals and people who may not be considered locals interacted with the camp?

Jacob Flaws (54:17.082)
So this is our most fundamental thing as human beings is we use our senses to interpret our spaces around us. for me, was, yeah, sight, smell and sound were the big ones. And sight is we often think of as the primary sense in Treblinka that functioned in terms of people seeing, even if you didn't interact with witnesses, right, or survivors, you could see during the daytime, you you see the black smoke cloud high above the camps. There's a picture in the book that I have of the

the plume of smoke above during the revolt, it's visible from many kilometers away. And we have to assume based on other pictures we have of Midanak during burning bodies that when they were burning 10,000 bodies a day, that smoke plume was massive. You had to be able to see it from, and we have evidence from people saying, saw this from 20 kilometers away. So that is something that you go outside, you you live in this space, it's a generational home. Your families lived there for hundreds of years.

You're always used to seeing the sky look a certain way. And then one day you see this massive plume of smoke and then it's there every day for 18 months and it's gone. So visually that's the way that you're brought in. The smell, I think is the most visceral one. So many people talk about this on a number of levels. Initially it's the decomposing bodies when they're buried or left laying around for the first couple of months. That spreads a long way. You can smell the camp for quite a ways depending on the wind.

and the humidity and the different environmental factors. The Nazis shift that to burning bodies, which is what creates the smoke plumes. And it also creates a new smellscape. And it's a horrible one. It's burning flesh. Claude Landsman is interviewing a local poll, and he's horrified when he finds out they conceived of a child. They conceived their child in this smellscape of Treblinka. He did the math. He said this child had to be conceived in this time period. But it's the idea that not only is it horrific and people witness it,

but they also adapt to it very quickly. And the best way that this kind of clicked for me was growing up in Iowa, had big old, you know, cattle farms and pig farms, and you could, you never knew they existed unless the wind was out of the Northeast. There was only a certain direction where they were 10 miles away. You could smell it on a windy Northeast day before a big storm. And you, you started to associate that. And it was very similar at Treblinka.

Jacob Flaws (56:40.474)
The sounds, course, know, gunfire, people screaming, the sounds of the bulldozers digging up bodies were drawn on into the night. Sometimes happy sounds, the Nazis would make them sing songs or play music as an orchestra, kind of to drown out the killing, but more, think, just to entertain and create the Nazis own behavioral spaces. We have local polls say that it was so pronounced, this beautiful song, it was as if it was happening in my own home. And so in this way,

you have a variety of sensory witnessing that is very fundamental, but it's so often overlooked. Like that's how history happens. We see things, we hear things, we smell things, and that is how we form our memory. So it's like when you listen to a song growing up, you don't hear it for 10 years and you hear it again one day, it takes you right back. It's very similar with sights, smells, and sounds. And that was one of the pieces here that I think really brought the whole thing together.

because that's the most universal of kind of witnessing.

Waitman Beorn (57:38.89)
And did you, this is a little bit more technical, but did you, I mean, did you sort of do the math as it were in terms of trying to figure out like what, how far away could you smell smoke? How far away can a human being smell smoke or how far away can you hear a gunshot or a scream? mean, it seems very nitpicky, but I think you could all, that's part of

drawing these circles of influence.

Jacob Flaws (58:13.26)
Absolutely. And I, you know, I did do this. I charted almost every single one that I found to see what town are they writing from, where are they at when they say this. And I would draw a straight line and try to actually get a good kilometer distance. And then I did some research into, yeah, auditory research and sensory research of how far this can actually go. And, you know, we had, I had a number of reports from places like Malkinia.

which is eight kilometers away, where they always started their testimony with a qualifier when the wind was right, which suggests they probably didn't smell it every day. But if the wind was out of the south, for example, which it would have been majority of the time, they would have smelled it. And so, you you started to look into atmospheric conditions and meteorology and I loved it because history is not just history. It's so interdisciplinary. Space is so interdisciplinary.

It was somewhat one of those things where I found out that it does vary. You had a certain radius, I think probably within three to four kilometers where the sounds, sights and smells were fairly consistent and pretty much nonstop. But beyond that, it was, it was kind of impacted by the nature of the century witnessing. So sounds don't travel quite as far as say sight or even smell sometimes, you know, visual cues are even lost as you get over the horizon. So it's all.

kind of interesting and how it's a little subjective in terms of it might have been a certain weather condition for someone beyond 20 kilometers to see something or hear something or smell something.

Waitman Beorn (59:49.482)
Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's interesting to the, you know, the, you've ever, you know, lived in a dorm room or something, you know, particularly amongst guys, because we tend to be stinky, right? And like, and like, you know, you're, you get used to a smell, but then maybe you leave it for a while and you come back and you're like, God, this room really stinks. and you sort of mentioned, you sort of talk about that as well, that, you know, there is

We tend to, we tend to, human bodies tend to sort of deaden sensory perception if you're exposed to it over, repeatedly over time as if it becomes sort of the, you know, the standard smell of a region or an area. But then again, if it's something that wafts in and out, then you perhaps notice it more because it becomes, it's not sort of the mainline standard.

Jacob Flaws (01:00:47.342)
Yeah, the very nature of sensory witnessing comes pretty apparent. It came to me when I was doing this that, you know, we're talking about Treblinka here, but what you're saying is spot on for almost every type of situation you could put yourself into. We habituate to a lot of things, especially smells, but even sights and sounds. You know, if you hear, I live near Newark airport and I could really tell the airplane's taken off the first couple of weeks I lived out here. I don't even notice it anymore unless I'm, it's a really loud plane or, so we.

We can habituate to just about anything and sadly, or almost, I don't know if it's sadly, it's just kind of human nature, but at Treblinka, that means it's the smells of Treblinka become part of your daily existence. that's so hard to wrestle with, but that's the reality. That's what the space was. And if the Nazis had a thousand year rike, I mean, it's haunting to think about. That's what the spaces would have been like if you lived near a death camp.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:40.246)
Well, and it's also, this also works for prisoners too, right? I mean, like, you know, that, that they, you know, end up having to live in the middle of this as well. And, you know, they're eating their breakfast, you know, in the midst of all of this, you know, and it's, you know, as you point out, it becomes sort of this, this new space where it's a new normal and things are sort of, it's, it's turned upside down, right?

Jacob Flaws (01:02:05.132)
Absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:10.998)
Can you talk a little bit, this is something you didn't cover so much in the book, because the book sort of ends with the war. What is the relationship of people that live in the close proximity to Tablinka today? And did you travel around and sort of talk to anybody or have you done research about sort of how the local populations remember or don't remember?

or don't interact with this history. I'm just curious generally.

Jacob Flaws (01:02:43.032)
Yeah, so that's one thing I really wanted to get into and I thought would be a big part of this project that turned out not to be. There's a number of reasons why that didn't turn out that way. For one, a lot of people who know this area told me that they probably won't talk to me. Just they're very protective of this history. They're very protective of even anyone else telling this history. I think of Jan Gross and kind of the backlash that he got for, you know, a great book in Neighbors. But he wrote about Golden Harvest, which is another book of his.

that actually directly impacted my book where he writes about these local Poles immediately after the war going to Treblinka, digging amongst the ashes and the bones to try to get at what they think are valuables that are buried in the sands of Treblinka. And, you know, I often think about that in terms of it's so easy to think about that as an abhorrent act. And it certainly is. But at some level, they're also pulling out pots and pans. also pulling out household items.

to try to rebuild their own lives in this weird way. They're almost trying to reclaim this space, which is, know, the, question I have is who's spaces that left to reclaim that was owned by a Polish person before the war, the Nazis come and turn it into a death camp. The local polls go and dig in it, which is horrifying on the surface. You start to dig deeper though. And you say, well, it's always been in their backyard. It's a space of 800,000. You know, it's a grave in many regards and.

So that's something I tried to wrestle with, but I knew the local polls probably weren't gonna talk to me about that. So I wasn't able to really dive into that. One of the areas that I was impacted was my own perceptions of how the space goes on in the region around Treblinka. And so the last time I was there, I had about two hours to kill before my train took me back to Krakow, which is a long train ride. But I went to Mount Kenya, which is still the main railway hub. That's why they chose.

Treblinka near there in the first place. And I went and walked around Malkenia and it was the middle of summer and I was expecting the space to be dark and everybody to be sad and be very dreary, right? Because Treblinka is five miles down the road and you know that. A lot of people go to Malkenia asking, can you drive me to Treblinka? Where's the taxi? This type of thing. And I show up around the corner and there's this park and there's a festival going on. It's a...

Jacob Flaws (01:05:05.998)
They have carnival rides and petting zoo and food and fun. It's a solstice festival. And I stopped and checked it out and I was like, you know what? These human beings are going on with their lives. They didn't choose for Treblinka to to go next door. it really changed a lot for me because I I somehow had this belief that they should they should have to be sad for living next to Treblinka for the next 100, 200, 300 years. But I started to view history as a longer, dreier event.

Kind of a shorter, quicker answer to the question is, you know, I did ask the Polish person working at the Treblinka museum they have on site, if it was weird to be working at a death camp, because I wanted to know, you know, and she said, you know, the first couple of days I'd noticed it. I noticed that I was coming, my job was coming to man this museum station at a death camp. She's like, and then it was just work for me. So.

I know it's not probably a super clear question. I wanted to, I would have loved to go talk to these people because I know the stories got passed down. A lot of them probably aren't around who witnessed the camp. But unfortunately, I don't think they would have talked to me. And so I was able to live vicariously through landsmen, through some of the other stuff, the reports from the area and kind of my own experiences with what the local area is like today.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:26.122)
Well, I mean, and that's totally fair too. I mean, you I asked the question because I was, I'm intellectually curious about it. you know, but, but sometimes, you know, research doesn't work out and, know, we can't do the things that we want to do, but it would be interesting for someone to do it, you know, that, has either the sort of in, or the ability to sort of do that work. Because I think, you know, these are probably stories that get passed down within families. That would be interesting to hear.

I know you have to go teach. I want to wrap up with our sort of final question, which is, you know, what is, what is one book on the Holocaust that you found particularly impactful, useful that you recommend for our listeners to check out.

Jacob Flaws (01:07:13.956)
Yeah, so I'll actually give you two, as we all are, love books. So the first one was Simone Gigliotti's A Trained Journey. It changed the way I understood space, changed the way I perceived of space and how the human body functions as a vessel of kind of the attack of a perpetrator. And then the one I'm currently reading that I wish I, I mean, it wasn't out before this went to press, but.

Caroline Sturdy-Coles was really, really impactful in my own work with her archeology at Treblinka. And she's had really great access to this camp. She wrote a book called Adolf Island, which is about the occupation at Alderney and her ability to go in. I, I, I've spoken with Caroline a little bit about my own research and I think we have similar questions. And it sounds like you do as well in terms of how we're affected by space, her ability to.

understand and try to understand what went on in this space. It just blows my mind every time she does it. That's her latest book and I'm reading it right now and it's it's fascinating. It's one that I think pairs well with my book, but I wish I would have had maybe even before it came out.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:24.402)
Absolutely. No, that's great. And I will mention just a self referential plug. Caroline was a guest as well. So there's an episode on the podcast with her. If you want to hear her talking about her work and about archeology in general, which I think is a fascinating topic. Jacob, thanks so much for coming on. This was an amazing conversation and I really recommend your book. It's well-written, it's accessible.

And it really does some new things in trying to lay out, particularly the information about the final solution in general, to blink in particular and the sort of way that it spreads throughout the landscape and much more than just the confines of the camp itself. Yeah, go ahead.

Jacob Flaws (01:09:15.162)
Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. And I know we'll have many more conversations, but it's been a pleasure to chat with you about the book.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:22.582)
Absolutely. This was great. And for everybody else, once again, thanks so much for listening. Please, you do have a take a minute on Apple podcasts, write a comment. Tell us what you, I'm using scare quotes here, like slash enjoy about the podcast. get it. You don't like or enjoy the Holocaust, but you know what I mean. That's really useful. It's helpful for everybody involved. And once again, Jacob, thanks so much for coming on,

Jacob Flaws (01:09:53.134)
Thank you so much, I appreciated it.