Few visible traces remain of the Treblinka killing center, fifty miles northeast of Warsaw, where approximately 900,000 people were murdered between late July 1942 and October 1943. In his comprehensive study of what transpired at Treblinka, Jacob Flaws explains that, as was the case with all the Operation Reinhard camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka), the Nazis were faced with the problem of carrying out mass killings in broad daylight. With this in mind, the site they chose for the camp had an advantageous “natural topography”: a woodland surrounding that concealed it from prying eyes. Cut off from the world, the Nazis transformed Treblinka into a “private realm,” erecting two sets of fences and even implanting additional rows of trees (20). In this way, they kept their activities hidden both from locals and from those who, in the future, would come seeking evidence of crimes.

Flaws’s initial chapters deal with thorny questions about the perspectives of the soldiers who worked at the camp, a topic also addressed in Sara Berger’s Experten der Vernichtung: Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka (Hamburger Edition, 2013), which likewise scours troves of testimonies and interviews with the killing specialists of Operation Reinhard. Flaws acknowledges that the Nazi perpetrators were humans rather than monsters; as one might reasonably expect, they tended to rationalize their actions. The window for normalcy thus shifted, and the killers built themselves an environment they could perceive as a workspace. They were supported in this by Treblinka’s nods toward normalcy: the camp contained a petting zoo, a designated area for exercise, and other amenities.

The chapters of Flaws’s study depict a world in which many kinds of deception prevailed. The most elaborate ruse at Treblinka was “the creation of a fake train station in the camp’s unloading area,” which made some Jews imagine they were arriving at a waystation, rather than a killing center (29). Attentively reconstructing the experiences of Jewish prisoners, especially the relatively small number who were allowed to survive, even briefly, rather than being immediately murdered by carbon monoxide, Flaws describes the teams into which the prisoners were organized. These included “work Jews”; “gold Jews,” who were responsible for retrieving valuables, especially victims’ gold teeth; the Camouflage Brigade and Forest Brigade, who concealed the camp’s barbed wire fences; and the so-called “blue group,” who were tasked with offloading trains and evacuating the corpses of those who died along the way (83). Spaces of Treblinka provides a detailed taxonomy not found elsewhere.

The salient argument behind Flaws’s study is that Treblinka’s killing machinery was much messier and more disorderly than it was efficient; there is no such thing as “clean” killing. Where humans are made to kill humans, the process inevitably becomes chaotic, and, because victims never assent, one always finds signs of a struggle, indications that victims fought to live. Manifestations of turmoil and disarray were everywhere, in the sounds and refuse produced, both inside and outside the fences. Smoke, for example, was seen and smelled from miles away, and Flaws’s chapter “A Sensory Space” details the “sensory contamination” that saturated the air surrounding the camp (130). According to testimony, the odors were still detectable as late as 1947.

Spaces of Treblinka arrived shortly after the release of Jonathan Glazer’s feature film Zone of Interest (2023), centered on Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant who lived with his family at the site of a Nazi killing center and generally behaved as though his family situation was routine. Auschwitz and Treblinka were quite different kinds of camps, yet here too, the noxious sounds and smells had to be actively, even stubbornly denied, should one have aimed to pretend one was merely doing one’s job. Bearing in mind the grinding, machine-like soundtrack of Glazer’s film, one of Flaws’s most fascinating passages concerns the relentless scraping of the machine used to exhume bodies at Treblinka, “a modified bulldozer named the Kopachke … which was ‘forever’ digging ditches around the camp”; its noise could be heard miles away (157). Flaws writes thoughtfully about how, at Treblinka, the “heavy machinery droned on and guns fired into the night” (158). Relying on witness testimonies from archives in Warsaw, oral history interviews from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the extensive collection of testimonies recorded by Claude Lanzmann for the film Shoah (1985), and on a reservoir of trial transcripts, Flaws’s study, with its six well-organized chapters and copious photographic illustrations, paints a thorough and disturbing picture of one of the worst things humans have ever done to other humans.