Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture: “Holocaust Diaries: Memory, History, Testimony”
About the Event
Join AHEC on November 5, 2026 for our annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture, in partnership with the UAB Department of History. This year, Dr. Alexandra Garbarini, professor of History and Jewish Studies at Williams College, will speak about her decades-long research on Holocaust diaries.
In cities, towns, and villages across Europe, in ghettos, hiding places, concentration and transit camps, and even in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Jews kept diaries. In her lecture, Alexandra Garbarini will discuss this phenomenon, which developed among Jewish women and men, adults and youth, during the Holocaust. Rather than analyze a small number of texts which can be interpreted and reinterpreted, her focus will be an overview of diary writing for what it reveals about the perspectives of their writers, the victims. Her talk will connect the phenomenon of diary writing to the writing of new histories of the Holocaust, and it will explore how studying Holocaust diaries can help keep the history and lessons of the Holocaust—as well as the voices of the victims—alive.
This lecture is free, but registration is required.
About the Speakers
Dr. Alexandra Garbarini
Alexandra Garbarini is Hans W. Gatzke ’38 Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Williams College. Her 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 historiography. She 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 several volumes. 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. She is currently writing a new 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 serves on the Academic Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.