Webinar Information
The 2026 webinar "The Use of Holocaust Diaries by Historians" is part of the interdisciplinary and transnational research project on Holocaust Diaries.
It addresses current research questions, methodological approaches, and challenges of historical memory, documentation, and education.
The event is open to scholars, students, educators, and all members of the interested public.
Participation is free, but registration is required.
Nina Siegal: Holocaust Diaries during World War II in the Netherlands
On March 28, 1944, the crackling voice of Gerrit Bolkestein, Dutch minister of education, arts and sciences, came across the airwaves from London on Radio Oranje, the broadcast station for the government in exile and asked his countrymen to preserve their personal correspondence and ordinary journals, for collection and possible publication after the war. “If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents— a diary, letters.” Three days after The Netherlands was liberated, a new institute opened its doors to collect and preserve such materials. Today known as the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the diary archive contains more than 2,100 diaries, written by people from all across the political, economic, and social spectrum.
In 2019, Nina Siegal began a research project into the archive, and selected seven diaries from the trove for her book, The Diary Keepers, published by ECCO/HarperCollins in 2023, which tells the story of World War II and the Holocaust in The Netherlands, mostly through the original words of the diarists. She will discuss how she chose the diaries to use for her book, what kinds of ethical and permissions issues she faced, and how she structured a narrative to give a 360 degree view of the war, adding her own insights and analysis to the eventual mix.
About the speaker
Nina Siegal is a Culture Writer for The New York Times, and the author of three novels and a nonfiction historical work, The Diary Keepers (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023) an exploration of World War II in the Netherlands through diaries from the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A current PhD candidate at A.H.M., Siegal received her B.A. from Cornell University in English Literature (1991), and her M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her numerous grants and award include a Fulbright Fellowship (2006-2007) and the 2021 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant.
Amy Simon: Searching for Yiddish Holocaust diaries
In 2008, I began my search for Yiddish Holocaust diaries. I spent the following two years searching archives around
the world to find what I hoped would be every single Yiddish diary that remained from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos.
This process produced fundamental questions about the definition of the term diary about the nature of archival collection,
description, preservation, sharing, and access; and about publication and translation across multiple national contexts.
This workshop presentation will address these issues in order to open up a space to contemplate their implications
for the broader H-Diaries project.
About the speaker
Amy Simon is an Associate Professor and holds the Farber Family Chair in Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History
at Michigan State University where she has won multiple awards for her teaching and service. Her publications include
Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries: Encountering Persecutors and Questioning Humanity (Routledge, 2023),
as well as articles and chapters on Holocaust diaries, fiction, memoir,and pedagogy in Holocaust Studies:
A Journal of Culture and History, the Journal of Jewish Identities,
The Journal of Jewish Education, and several edited volumes.
Martin Dean: A Case Study of a Reconstructed Holocaust Diary
Martin Dean will examine the unique qualities of Ita Dimant's reconstructed Holocaust diary and how it can help us to understand the tenuous and tortuous paths of Holocaust survivors. Ita Dimant was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, who escaped from there to Czestochowa, where she lived mostly on the “Aryan side“ and acted as a courier for Underground Zionist organizations, passing on information about the situation in other ghettos. Fearing exposure, she contemplated suicide, but ultimately was deported to forced labor in Germany, where she survived until the liberation.
About the speaker
Martin Dean received his PhD in European History from Queens‘ College, Cambridge. He has worked as a researcher for the Special Investigations Unit in Sydney, Australia, and as the Senior Historian for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit in London, where he participated as an expert witness and advisor in six Nazi war crimes trials.
As a Research Scholar at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he was a Volume Editor for The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. His publications include Collaboration in the Holocaust (2000) and Robbing the Jews (2008), which won a National Jewish Book Award in 2009. He is based in Bethesda, Maryland and works as a Historical Researcher for SNA International. His latest book, Investigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death, was published by Lexington Press in 2023.
Emily Klein: Materiality, Manuscripts, and Meaning: Examining Holocaust-Era Diaries as Material Objects
This presentation will highlight several Holocaust-era diaries and their material qualities to demonstrate how studying diaries as three-dimensional artifacts with distinct physical features and object biographies can influence our understanding of individual diaries, the conditions in which they were written, the people who wrote and kept them, and the ways in which diaries written during this period can challenge conventional assumptions about diaries as a genre. It will also consider the possibilities and challenges associated with translating these material qualities into structured data for digital humanities projects.
About the speaker
Emily Klein is an independent scholar. She was the 2022-2023 Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) where she designed a relational database to study the materiality of Holocaust diary manuscripts.
She holds a Masters in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture with Distinction from the University of St Andrews where her dissertation examined the materiality, provenance, and digital remediation of Holocaust diary manuscripts.
She has been invited to present her work for a variety of organizations, including the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, Rowan University, and the United States Naval Academy.
Alexandra Garbarini: Introduction. "Holocaust Diaries, Holocaust Histories"
Alexandra Garbarini considers the phenomenon of diary writing which, under particular and varying conditions, developed among Jewish adults, youth, and children across Europe during the Holocaust.
Rather than analyze a small number of texts which can be interpreted and reinterpreted, the focus here is an overview of diary writing for what it reveals about the perspectives of their writers.
Her talk will connect diary writing to the cultural, social, and even political history of the Holocaust. New readings of Jewish diaries along with the publication of new editions of diaries in multiple languages have contributed to the writing of new histories of the Holocaust.
About the speaker
Alexandra Garbarini is a historian of twentieth-century Europe whose research brings together
the history of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence; the interdisciplinary study of autobiographical
sources, specifically testimony, diaries and letters; and the history of documentation practices.
Garbarini is the author of Numbered Days: Diary Writing and the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2006; National Jewish Book Award finalist), and co-author of Jewish Responses to Persecution, volume 2, 1939-1940 (Rowman & Littlefield, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011).
In addition to articles and reviews, she has co-edited two volumes: a special issue of Etudes Arméniennes Contemporaines on "Victim Testimony and Mass Violence" (2015), and Lessons and Legacies, vol. XIII, New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (Northwestern University Press, 2018). Her work has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Program, the DAAD, the Mellon Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Philosophical Society, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Her most recent publication, co-authored with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is the English edition of the Holocaust diary of Lucien Dreyfus: 'A Terrible and Terribly Interesting Epoch': The Holocaust Diary of Lucien Dreyfus (Rowman & Littlefield, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021).
She is currently writing a book about victim testimony to mass violence and genocide from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust, tentatively titled, Atrocities' Truth Tellers: Testimony before the Holocaust.
Garbarini teaches at Williams College, in Massachusetts in the United States, and serves on the Academic Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.