At the center of Chad S. A. Gibbs’s new monograph is the August 2, 1943, armed revolt at Treblinka, when the camp’s Jewish forced laborers attacked guards and escaped en masse from the death camp, located under two hours from Warsaw. The Germans quickly regained the upper hand and killed many of the inmates as they attempted to flee; nevertheless, several hundred escaped the camp, and at least seventy survived the war. These survivors’ testimonies would form the core of the historical record about the camp, at which almost a million people were murdered. Survival in Treblinka illustrates that the revolt’s partial success came down to more than just courage or luck, although those factors were indispensable. Instead, Gibbs illuminates the gendered, spatial, and social dynamics that shaped the revolt and its memory and challenges readers to rethink Holocaust survivorship more broadly.
The author employs three interlocking methodological approaches to tease out the evolution of resistance in Treblinka. He grounds his analysis in a deep knowledge of and sensitivity to the spatial layout of the camp. Where different prisoner constituencies slept, worked, or congregated shaped their ability to communicate and plot. However, the revolt was not wholly shaped by the camp’s geographies; instead, Gibbs emphasizes the importance of prisoner agency in both life in and escape from Treblinka. Prewar social networks structured relationships among conspirators and shaped who among new arrivals prisoners chose to save from the gas chambers. Inmates made deliberate choices about who to bring into the conspiracy and engaged in violence to protect their resistance networks and punish informers. Emphasizing and excavating the agency of Treblinka prisoners — a group otherwise wholly at the mercy of their Nazi captors — is among the book’s most important innovations, both methodologically and morally.
Survival at Treblinka’s most interesting lens is that of gender. While most male survivor testimonies downplayed or ignored the contributions of female prisoners to the revolt, Gibbs argues that women were vital to the uprising’s planning and execution. He finds evidence that a brothel existed within the camp and that, on the day of the revolt, its female slave-laborers distracted the guards who visited them, thus allowing male conspirators to steal their arms. Gendered expectations of women’s behavior allowed female-dominated spaces, such as the brothel and the kitchens, to emerge as central sites of planning and storing weapons, as camp guards were less likely to patrol these areas. Those teaching courses on gender and the Holocaust will find much for their students to ponder in these important chapters.
The book concludes with an updated and expanded list of known Treblinka survivors. The author expresses some skepticism towards compiling lists of Holocaust survivors; lists imply finality, and so much of the Holocaust is both unknown and unknowable. Still, his list is impressive, and Gibbs’s categorization of Treblinka survivors into different categories based on how they survived and departed the camp invites readers to ponder, as he does, how we define survivorship. He advocates for a more nuanced localization of survivorship — what exactly did survivors survive, and what actions did they take to do so? — to better understand this foundational category of Holocaust victims.
Slim and readable, Survival at Treblinka will interest scholars of the Holocaust as well as laypeople curious to understand how heroism takes shape and takes flight in the most desperate of circumstances.
Meghan Riley earned a PhD in Modern European History from Indiana University. She is a postdoctoral fellow at Northern Arizona University.
