No Man’s Land: Between Refugee Geography of Małkinia and Holocaust Memory of Treblinka

Abstract

The article identifies the “crowding effect” in post-atrocity geographies–spaces saturated with overlapping layers of extreme human experience. Introducing this concept to memory studies, it argues that later exterminatory practices in Eastern Europe obscured earlier refugee geographies, contributing to the absence of a collective memory of flight, a crucial dimension of Polish Jewish experience during the Second World War. The study juxtaposes Treblinka, the Nazi killing center, and nearby Małkinia, whose wartime no man's land along the German-Soviet demarcation line served as the main escape corridor for Jewish refugees. Drawing on firsthand testimonies, it shows that the no man's land was a dense and revealing site of experience. Three vectors emerge: as a laboratory of early anti-Jewish violence prefiguring the Holocaust, as a site of anti-refugee measures anticipating contemporary modalities of coercive immobility, and as a corridor of survival for Jews seeking openings in treacherous European terrain.