“Jacob Flaws’s spatial history of Treblinka invites us to consider the camp not only as a fenced-off site, but one connected to the world outside through flows of transports, sounds and smells, escaped prisoners, and information. He offers a dynamic spatial history of the Holocaust through analysis of one of its most important places. It is suggestive of the importance of thinking not only about the interactions of multiple groups and individuals but also about the overlapping of multiple scales.”—Tim Cole, author of Holocaust Landscapes
“Jacob Flaws’s sophisticated and expert analysis of Treblinka offers a major and fundamental contribution to the field of Holocaust studies based on the strength of the argument and the wealth of primary and secondary sources. . . . This is a cutting-edge approach within current Holocaust studies. . . . The account does not sacrifice the importance of individual human experience in favor of theory but rather does an excellent job of marrying the two together.”—Edward Westermann, author of Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany
“With his remarkable range of sources and careful attention to time, place, and emotion, Jacob Flaws allows us to understand Treblinka in a way that few previous historians have. Spaces of Treblinka reveals a site by no means hidden away but smelled, heard, seen, and interacted with for miles around.”—Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
“I have rarely read such a well-written, powerful, important work. . . . The balance between victims, perpetrators, and what scholars used to call bystanders is exceptionally good. . . . The quality of the writing is matched by the clarity of Flaws’s vision for the book and a number of novel concepts that frame his analysis. ‘Zones of witnessing’ is particularly apt and will be picked up by many readers interested in the ongoing spatial turn in Holocaust studies.”—Anne Kelly Knowles, coeditor of Geographies of the Holocaust
