He is also a nonresident Research Fellow at the National World War II Museum (New Orleans, LA) for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Flaws applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Jacob Flaws's website.(local residents)…became relatively passive witnesses to what was occurring – only brought into the fold as random interactions dictated. Consequently, how someone responded when a Jewish escapee from Treblinka knocked on their door in the middle of the night truly varied on a case-by-case basis, creating a human space around the camp that was defined by uncertainty. Escapees could be shot at by a Pole in one house while the person next door might provide them food and shelter.The Page 99 Test “worked” remarkably well in the case of my new book, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp. The page is part of the introduction to Chapter 4: An Interactional Space, a chapter in which I was particularly struck by how each escapee created random vectors of interaction through split-second decisions often made on the run. The natural environment played a major part in this, especially in terms of dictating which spaces offered concealment or which were simply impassable. But it was the happenstance human encounters that often carried the weightiest consequences, usually for both parties involved.
Historians continue to be frustrated by the difficulty in making blanket statements explaining why there was such a variance in Polish-Jewish interactions during the Holocaust…. Nonetheless, when it comes to explaining Polish behavior, it is obvious that each individual case merits its own evaluation and judgment. As Warsaw Ghetto Uprising planner Yitzhak Zuckerman astutely put it, “You can’t generalize about the Poles.” Thus, aside from documenting the widely varying Polish responses to escaping Jews, I am most interested here in exploring how the concept of space also played into the equation. In doing so, I acknowledge that during the war, Poland was actively being colonized by the Germans. Subsequently, Poles lost jurisdiction over many spaces, even their most intimate ones – their homes – a spatial domain that geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues is universally recognized as offering basic security from the outside world. As spatial theorist Tim Cresswell explains further, home is “an intimate place…where a person can withdraw from…the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space.” Consequently, as the Germans imposed unlimited jurisdiction over Polish spaces, they stole this control, this simple sovereignty to govern one’s everyday life, from Poles.
Hence, as you can see on the text from page 99, I am seeking to add nuance to explaining why some Poles helped Jews, others were indifferent, and some even harmed them. Importantly, what’s missing from the page itself, but is included elsewhere in the chapter, is the disclaimer that I am not apologizing for Poles who harmed Jews or seeking to absolve those who are rightfully guilty of impeding Jewish survival. Instead, as the page 99 text does show, I’m arguing each case needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This is especially powerful to remember when we consider that the clean categorization (victim, bystander, perpetrator) of individuals fails in the majority of cases, if for no other reason than these categories are fluid, and many individuals may span the range of all three (or more) within a short time frame.
More broadly, page 99 reflects the deeper perspective the entire book is trying to bring into the conversation – human spaces are very nuanced and are indeed “defined by uncertainty.” The goal of the book is to put German, Jewish, and Polish voices into conversation with one another to help recreate the contemporary spatial reality that comprised Treblinka and its surroundings when it existed from 1942-1943. That reality was multi-perspectival, nuanced, and uniquely individual, but there were also fairly consistent patterns associated with witnessing the death camp as well. If just glancing to page 99, you get a sense of this, but you almost certainly need the rest of the book to help envision the true scope of what Treblinka actually was.
--Marshal Zeringue
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