Sensory Witnessing at Treblinka

Abstract

ABSTRACT Employing a model of spatial analysis that examines the smells, sights, and sounds emanating from the Treblinka death camp, I chart a ‘zone of sensory witnessing’ that extended beyond Treblinka’s boundaries for many kilometers into the surrounding countryside. This research vastly expands the number of known and potential witnesses to Treblinka by putting the voices of Jewish survivors, German camp personnel, and local Polish residents in conversation with one another. This methodology privileges the fact that each person within the zone of sensory witnessing, when stripped of their relative power dynamics, possessed a body capable of experiencing similar sensory phenomena, and I explore the recollections and testimonies of these individuals to describe the process by which sensory witnessing occurred both inside and outside the camp. Furthermore, how these witnesses interpreted what they experienced – as well as how this then affected, and often changed, their daily lives for the duration of the camp’s existence – provides another example of just how widely sites of atrocity in the Holocaust actually reached. Specifically, it shows how sensory witnessing during the Holocaust altered patterns of behavior, even for those witnesses not directly targeted during the genocide. More broadly, this research offers a counternarrative to Nazi imagery presenting death camps as isolated and clean killing factories; positing instead that the reality for anyone within the zone of sensory witnessing consisted of brutal, horrific sensory experiences that were universally unpleasant, invasive, and widespread. Above all, this case study serves as a reminder that historical spaces once existed as sites of vivid, multisensorial reality, and as a result, genocide never occurs in obscurity.